SOURCE: Garner, Stanton B., Jr. “Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the Politics of Embodiment.” Theatre Journal, no. 2 (May 1990): 145-54.

[In the following essay, Garner considers the influence of Bertolt Brecht on Weiss's work and classifies Weiss's dramas as post-Brechtian.]

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.

—Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”

Marat
forget the rest
there's nothing else
beyond the body

—Weiss, Marat/Sade¹

BRECHT, VERFREMDUNG, AND THE SUFFERING BODY

Bertolt Brecht's death in 1956 inaugurated a period in modern political theater whose theoretical and dramaturgical parameters have yet to be defined. It may appear presumptuous to apply the label “post-Brechtian” to a field that contains plays as diverse as Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Churchill's Cloud 9, Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and Müller's Hamletmachine, but the term does find more than historical justification. Much of the political drama since Brecht's death has been written and performed with his formidable theoretical example in view, and even those dramatists who have refused Brecht's political aesthetic have done so in the wake of its radical reconfigurations of theater art. Those dramatists who draw upon Brechtian theory have participated in the broader reinterpretation of this theory in terms of evolving political, cultural, and theatrical milieux. “We should begin with Brecht,” Edward Bond has remarked, “but we shouldn't end there.” In Heiner Müller's words, “To use Brecht without criticizing him is to betray him.”²

There are a number of ways in which one might characterize the “post-Brechtian” in its contemporary manifestations, as well as a number of developments in which one may discern the revision of Brechtian theater practice: the postmodern radicalizing of Brechtian aesthetics and its subversion of dogmatism and “presence” within Brecht's theory of performance; the simultaneous appropriation and revision of Brechtian political theater on the part of feminists and non-Western writers; experiments in decentering the function of dramatic/theatrical authorship; stagings of Brecht's plays that open dialogues with Brecht's own theater practice.³ This article will focus on a prominent signature of post-Brechtian political drama, a feature at the heart of its ideological and representational strategies: the almost obsessive interest in the body as a political unit, its function within the play of political forces, and its role within the contest of subjectivity and subjection. Exploiting the body's centrality within the theatrical medium, contemporary political dramatists have refigured the actor's body as a principal site of theatrical and political intervention, establishing (in the process) a contemporary “body politic” rooted in the individual's sentient presence. This corporealizing of the political field is apparent in Trevor Griffiths's Occupations, a play that dramatizes a socialist uprising in the northern Italy of 1920. Griffiths's play opens with the following theatrical sequence:

The stage is in total darkness. We hear, faintly at first, growing gradually louder and more insistent, a sung version of the Internationale. A projected image slowly emerges: the famous Tbi (“You—have you enrolled as a volunteer yet?” D. S. Moore, Russia, 1920). It's held, red and challenging, for several moments. Cut suddenly, as a fast spot reveals POLYA bending over the bed to inject the writhing ANGELICA. ANGELICA shudders, quietens. POLYA cools her brow with a cloth. Music down. Excited hubbub of conference. Take out spot a second after the VOICE begins. Replace with [a projection of] Lissitsky's 1920 abstract With the Red Wedge Divide the Whites.⁴

Taking advantage of the technical resources that have created new spatial possibilities for the contemporary theater, Griffiths's stage directions set the stage in a performance dialogue with other media: painting, poster art, slide projection, music. Even as it foregrounds the technological manipulation of space, though, this multimedial juxtaposition discloses the non-technological presence of the histrionic body, which asserts itself (in Griffiths's play as in all theatrical performance) as both visual element and spatializing center. Angelica constitutes an emblem of the play's civil disturbance, and she does so through her corporeal presence: writhing in mute convulsions, the actress's body performs the struggle to escape its internal suffering at the same time that it forces a centering of spatial awareness (for both character and audience) on this point of physical distress. Counterpointed by the pictorial images of Moore and Lissitsky, the center of Griffiths's political and scenic field is the body in space, both site and means of theatrical “occupation.”

Of all the forms which the body has assumed on the post-Brechtian political stage, the most pervasive and urgent is the body in its deepest extremity: the suffering, violated body, which Elaine Scarry has analyzed under the rubric “the body in pain.”⁵ Described through dramatic speech and represented onstage, the body in contemporary political theater is a body tortured, disciplined, confined, penetrated, maimed, extinguished. From the murder, sodomy, and rape in Brenton's The Romans in Britain, the onstage “pricking” scene in Churchill's Vinegar Tom, and the pornographic violence of Daniels's Masterpieces through the recounted horrors of Weiss's Investigation and Rabe's Vietnam plays, the sheer scope of bodily violation in this drama creates a landscape-spectacle of atrocity whose excesses, as we shall see, both mark and transgress the theater's representational space. When Peter Brook characterizes the psychic traces of theatrical performance as a “silhouette” that “burns” in the mind and “scorches” the memory, his language indirectly captures the searing effect of such plays on the audience, the vicarious infliction of pain both during and after performance.⁶ The stoning of the baby that occasioned such outrage when it was performed in Bond's Saved, like the stage presence of the poet's tortured body in Maishe Maponya's Gangsters, challenges the representational conventions of even Brechtian political theater and claims a new field of depiction and response. Brecht sought an analytic disclosure of power and its relations; subsequent dramatists have sought to represent this power at its most elemental, through its often visceral registers in human tissue. The words of Büchner's Danton anticipate the images of this power as they have occupied and traumatized the modern consciousness—Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Cambodia, El Salvador, the Sahel refugee camps—and as they have been dramatized on the contemporary political stage: “These days everything is worked in human flesh. That's the curse of our times.”⁷

To restrict the staging of the suffering body to the spectacular, however, is to ignore the complexity of this body's presence in the contemporary political theater. For the body as it is subjected within this theater stands, not merely as a figure within representational equations, but also as the source of its own, often ambiguous modes of habitation. Post-Brechtian theater demonstrates a recurrent interest in the phenomenal dimension of the body as a political entity and in the experiential issues which this body brings into focus: the world-constitution of the bodied subject as it interacts with its environment, and the consequences upon this subject of an external infringement directed at the body and the personal world it serves to ground. By appropriating the body as locus of sensory interchange with its natural and social environments, and by investigating the subjective contours of this embodied world, post-Brechtian theater suggests a partial revaluation of the “political,” one which goes—in important ways—against the Brechtian grain. If Brecht worked to politicize the Lebenswelt, or lived world, rendering its components externalized and subject to configuration and analysis, many post-Brechtian dramatists have worked to phenomenalize the political, and to pursue its roots in the personal realities of embodiment and world-constitution. If we seek to understand the powerful disruptions which the suffering body poses for the representational modes of contemporary political drama, we must begin with the body as zero-point of the phenomenal world.

In its powerful and complex habitational presence, the body has constituted an uneasy presence for Brechtian drama and its theory. One can discern within the dramatic development from the pre-Marxist to the Marxist Brecht a suppression of this body and its potentially anarchic claims to attention. The desiring, “carnivalesque” body rendered with such assertion in the figure of Baal (and, to lesser extents, in figures such as Kragler, Anna, Garga, Shlink, and Edward II) is harnessed, in the later plays, through characters less prone to its excesses. Although Schweyk and Azdak belong to a tradition of clown theater that foregrounds the body and its appetites, a tradition that extends through the giullari of Dario Fo, their roles are largely strategic, and the Falstaffian potential of their misrule is precluded by their specifically political functions in their respective plays.⁸ Likewise, the suffering to which the body is liable—its hunger and pain, its subjection to inflictions from both inside and out—is increasingly controlled in its representation within Brecht's plays: the violence perpetrated (directly and indirectly) by Macheath is narrated through euphemisms, while the physical suffering that forms the backdrop of Fear and Misery in the Third Reich occurs offstage. Baal stabs Ekhart in a phantasmagoric sequence of onstage violence; but of the significant number of deaths figuring in Brecht's later plays, the shooting of Kattrin is one of the few actually presented to view.

This is not to suggest that the body and its needs relinquished their interest for Brecht in his plays of Marxist inspiration; on the contrary, Marxism clarified for Brecht the social dimension of such needs and their function within political/economic systems. As Darko Suvin claims, “[All of Brecht's major plays] deal with people's alienation faced with the historical institutionalizations of their basic strivings for food, sex, friendship and knowledge.”⁹ These clarifications, though, were accompanied by a representational shift, in which the desiring, suffering body was “taken out of itself” and refigured as an element, subject to analysis, within a rationalized mise-en-scène. Between Baal's boast that “My heaven is full of trees and bodies” and the opening lines of the “First Threepenny Finale”—“Man has a right, in this our brief existence / To call some fleeting happiness his own / Partake of worldly pleasures and subsistence / And have bread on his table rather than a stone”—is a gulf separating the embodied subject from an objectified body displayed to the scientific eye, a gulf essential to the politics of Brechtian reception.¹⁰ This objectification constitutes the organizing motif of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt as it applies to both an aesthetics of staging and a theory of acting. Disjunction of scenic elements within a relationship of mutual estrangement decenters the appetitive body as a zero-point of scenic orientation, while the tenets of Brechtian acting reposition this body both as presentational means and as observational site. The epic actor presents his or her body, not as it lives its sentient world, but as it is alienated by the analytic gaze: “The actor,” Brecht writes, “expresses his awareness of being watched. […] The artist's object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work.”¹¹ The aim of such moments in Brecht's plays is an acute visibility, in which the body stands clarified as a nexus of social gestures and relationships, becoming, through the resemanticizing of Brecht's theater, a sign of itself. Brechtian gestus foregrounds this body as signifying image etched in ideological outline: “The grouping of the characters on the stage and the movements of the groups must be such that the necessary beauty is attained above all by the elegance with which the material conveying that gest is set out and laid bare to the understanding of the audience.”¹² In scene 4 of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Azdak offers a lesson in the self-presentation of epic acting, subordinating the facts of sentience and appetite to their illustration, when he instructs the fugitive grand duke how to eat his cheese with the gestures and expressions of the poor. The moment is revealing, and typical. Characters speak of hunger in Brecht's plays, but seldom of its pangs, its perceptual depletion, and its other forms of internal urgency; his characters speak of pain, but seldom with the voice of its trauma. Whether or not Brecht may have equated embodied subjectivity with the unitary ego he was ideologically compelled to reject, Brechtian Verfremdung is, before all else, a strategic estrangement of the body as phenomenal site.¹³

A number of subsequent political dramatists have drawn upon the political concerns and modes of staging the body evident in Brecht's plays. Extending Brecht's concern with the signifying body, these dramatists have deepened their critique of its investment, centering attention even more fully on the body's actual subjection to imagistic and other forms of ideological consumption. But even those dramatists most “Brechtian” in theatrical technique have sought to undermine the exclusive hold of objectification over corporeality as it offers itself to experience; they have supplemented the strategic displacement of alienation with a dramaturgical attention to the body as a privileged point within representational systems. Post-Brechtian theater, in other words, explores the political and theatrical implications of an essential fact: that, of all the elements that comprise semiotic fields, the human figure is the only one that is itself a source of semiotic and other forms of meaning-constitution. To express this in more simple terms, the body represents an object of observation that actually looks back. In this sense, Beckett's Catastrophe—a play that stands, in many ways, diametrically opposed to the Brechtian project—offers a revealing prototype of the post-Brechtian politics of the body. For Beckett's play stages the catastrophic reversal that occurs within representational “display” when the body—arranged, exposed, whitened, and illuminated by the resources of theater technology—asserts itself as subject and reorients the field of performance in relation to its own gaze. The continuity with which this gaze extends both into Beckett's own drama (to Vladimir and Estragon, Winnie, the Protagonist of Film, and the Listener of That Time), and into the overtly political theater of Fo, Soyinka, Churchill, and Brenton, suggests that contemporary political theater shares an interest with the theater of Beckett (and other ostensibly apolitical dramatists) in the phenomenology of the theatrical body. Informed by these issues and modes, post-Brechtian theater directs its attention to the politics of human embodiment, and the exploration of this politics in terms of the suffering body stands at a considerable remove from the objectifying scientism of Brecht's Verfremdung. Considering the subversion of this scientism in the drama of Peter Weiss and Edward Bond, we can see the often problematic presence of the body within post-Brechtian political theater, and the extent to which this theater works to achieve a more deeply embodied play of the phenomenal and the representational.¹⁴

THE BODY AND BEYOND: TROTSKY IN EXILE AND MARAT/SADE

The reconfiguration of political analysis in terms of the “preobjectivist,” desiring body has significant historical and theoretical antecedents. If a return to corporeality as it lives and suffers its world recalls the theatrical body in early Brecht, it also evokes the early political theory of Marx, before he adopted and refined the scientism of Capital and the works that occupied his later years. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), Marx formulated a theory of economic life based on human “sensuousness” and its interactions with a nature in which the human subject seeks to externalize and (hence) know itself through productivity: “The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man's species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created.” Alienated labor under a system of private property estranges the human subject because it divorces this subject from its creative activity, rendering it an alien object unto itself amidst a dispossessed object-world where even the body's desire becomes estranged, other: “Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is itself something different from itself—that my activity is something else. …” Structuring this philosophical and economic vision is the human body, rendered fully “human” and able to inhabit its personal and shared life-world only when liberated from an alienating economic system: “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object made by man for man.” Through this liberation, in other words, the body becomes itself, both humanized in its sensory communion with nature and vulnerable to a material sentience that the individual subject can never fully transcend: “Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being.”¹⁵

Marx's analysis of labor and alienation in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts traces a polarity that governs the politics of embodiment in the contemporary political theater. On the one hand, post-Brechtian dramatists have staged the appropriation of object and space by the human subject, an inscription of this subject in its environment through language, gestural projection, and manipulation of the material world. Conceived from this point of view, the subject is fundamentally creative, seeking to transcend its material boundaries in an externalization that nevertheless fulfills the body's sentient and social needs. In gestural terms, this bodily self-projection manifests itself in the instrumental handling of objects to objectify and satisfy these needs, and to extend the individual's power of agency; in larger terms, it constitutes the building of society and its artifacts, for (as Elaine Scarry notes) “[e]very act of civilization is an act of transcending the body in a way consonant with the body's needs.”¹⁶ On the other hand, and more urgently, post-Brechtian theater has dramatized the collapse of such self-extension within a radical embodiment, realized within a body that is mortal, isolated within itself, subject to the annihilating force of pain. The suffering body, emblem of this condition, is no longer the seat of an externalizing productivity, the center of an individual and social Lebenswelt; instead, it becomes something inert, thinglike, a self-enclosed point of sensation within a derealized world empty of human content.¹⁷ To inflict deprivation, confinement, and violation upon the body is to bring about a phenomenal collapse reflected in the ambiguous term “subject,” for as the body loses its status as the seat of a self-transcending subjectivity, it becomes objectified in its transfixing sentience, “subject” only to its liable corporeality. The survivors of nuclear war in Bond's War Plays use stones, metal, and what tools they can find to begin rebuilding a humanized world, but in the background of this post-nuclear reconstruction lies the corporeal infliction of the holocaust itself: “And as the flesh burned from faces the skulls whistled. … The heart leapt up like a bird in its burning cage and the ribs whistled.”¹⁸

Peter Weiss stands as a pivotal dramatist in the contemporary theater of embodiment. Combining Brechtian presentational styles with an Artaudian interest in the afflicted body, his plays situate their political explorations between the phenomenal poles of self-extension and bodily sentience. Vietnam Discourse is firmly Brechtian in dramaturgical mode—simple in costume and gesture, declarative and explanatory in verbal delivery—and its account of human atrocity is tightly contained within a clarity of audience address. Presentation, in this case, mirrors subject, for like the medieval mysteries that serve as its dramaturgical ancestors, the play enacts the discovery and reaffirmation of vision throughout the history of the Vietnamese people, and their continuing will to liberate the present, a self-transcending historical imperative that—like the party loyalty dramatized in Brecht's The Measures Taken—distances individual suffering. The Investigation, on the other hand, drives Brechtian detachment to the brink of collapse by foregrounding this suffering to the point where its horror risks searing the precise language crafted to convey it. If, as Scarry suggests, intense pain is “language-destroying,” resisting expression and description, then the agony of the concentration camps threatens to exceed and cancel the play's documentary format, as the list of atrocities stands mute before an unspeakableness that ruptures the detachment of staged testimony with the weight of suffering.¹⁹ Occupying the non-linguistic space behind the play's verbal edifice is the body in extremis: branded, confined (hung from the frame of the sadistic “swing,” crammed forty to an 8′ by 8′ bunker cell), deprived, broken, killed by a numbing variety of means, opened, heaped among piles of other bodies, incinerated, reduced to itself and less, mocking even the possibility of political or other vision with its assertion of mute sentience. The Investigation takes place at a verbal impasse, that point at which language confronts a corporeal world that dismantles its public, private, and historical orderings.

Weiss most fully integrates his investigation of political vision with the problem of corporeality in two plays devoted to the planning and making of revolution. Trotsky in Exile outlines the dialectic of extension and embodiment, world-building and its collapse in bodily self-fixation, with unusual clarity. The choice of Trotsky as documentary subject was no doubt determined, in part, by the historical figure's political internationalism; throughout Weiss's play, Trotsky advocates the widest geographic scope for revolution, discussing the political and economic conditions in Africa, Asia, and South America and defending their importance against those who would restrict the scope of world-remaking within national borders. Trotsky, in short, stands as symbol of political vision itself as it advocates the transcending of its own position, and Weiss emblematizes this self-transcendence through a stage gesture repeated three times: “[Trotsky looks] through a telescope, describing with it a semi-circle to front.”²⁰

But like the scientific eye of Brecht's Galileo, Trotsky's telescopic vision is vulnerable to the fact of his historical and personal situation; his travels late in life are those of exile rather than world-repossession. Opposed by others, tsarists and fellow revolutionaries alike, he is subject finally to the restricted space of his body itself, which asserts its own diminished boundaries and personal space. Weiss counterpoints Trotsky at his telescope with Trotsky at his desk, absorbed within a restricted area of attention. To the Trotsky who converses with Diego Rivera and André Breton on international politics, Weiss counterpoints the Trotsky who admits to Lenin:

The body. Feel it all the time. Stomach. Intestines. Heart. Kidneys. These functions often claim my attention for days on end. Growing old. The beginning of death. Time. I thought of that even as a child. Saw it once as something long, like the stone step outside the house. Chronology. Counting. Time is formless. Has no shape til you begin to count. Sometimes I wake up sobbing. Terribly disturbed. Like falling through a strange door. Into a room you don't know. An odd light. Echoing voices. This searching for connections. Books. Unknown words. References you don't understand.

[52]

Weiss's fluid shifts of historical time within the play serve, paradoxically, to foreground the individual body as it is vulnerable to time, while Trotsky's disclosures reveal an external world potentially empty to the corporeally-bound subject: “You know, a little while ago I had great difficulty in finding out exactly where I was. Nothing but empty space. Yes. Hönnefoss. Yes. Norway” (97). In the dialectic of body and vision that governs this exploration of revolutionary and political efficacy, Trotsky's exile begins before he ever leaves his country; it is an ever-immanent exile within a body often riveting in its attentional claims, where structures in the external world indicating human presence and efficacy are suddenly drained of sense. Weiss discloses the body both as biological origin of the phenomenal world, and as its “vanishing point” (to borrow the title of one of his novels), that point at which visionary extension yields to enclosure. Underscoring this image of the liable body that constitutes the anatomical base of revolutionary thought and practice, Trotsky in Exile ends in tableau, its protagonist reading a manuscript while his assassin holds an ice-pick poised above his skull.

With this gesture, Trotsky in Exile recalls Marat/Sade, a study of revolution that climaxes in similar tableau—Marat at work in his bathtub, Charlotte Corday holding aloft the dagger that will render his body inanimate. In both subject and representation, the body's presence pervades everything in Marat/Sade, as it pervaded the French Revolution itself, a nexus of political events engineered through, and against, bodily iconographies. Memorialized through the political exploitation of its imagery, the Revolution constituted a spectacle of bodily exigency: the desiring body seeking to redress the poverty that afflicts it, and the body punished within a historical theater of pain. In its organized forms of public violence, it combined the vestiges of an older ritual punition, inscribing marks of power on the body of the accused, with a historically newer, technologized form of punishment, the guillotine, which enabled systematic, mechanical execution.²¹ Appropriated and adapted by Weiss, the backdrop of Marat/Sade is a bodily violation both torrential, apocalyptic (“Why do the children scream / What are those heaps they fight over / those heaps with eyes and mouths / What kind of town is this / hacked buttocks lying in the street”), and mathematical, precise—as Sade puts it, “technocratic.”²²

This body in extremis serves a dual function within the revolutionary ideology represented by Marat. On the one hand, it constitutes the source of needs to be redressed within a transformed order and a newly humanized world, a locus of desire that offers the promise (and threat) of social and political refashioning. On the other hand, it represents an obstacle to be overcome on the path to social metamorphosis, a material resistance to the realization of political vision. This resistance is encountered externally in the increasing number of individuals sacrificed to the revolution; as Marat observes, “Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough / then we saw thousands were still too few” (15). But the politics of revolutionary vision as articulated by Marat extends more personally into the intransigence of the flesh, for he includes his own body as a site for the political re-creation of nature:

Against Nature's silence I use action
In the vast indifference I invent a meaning
I don't watch unmoved I intervene
and say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them
The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes

[26-27]

As in Trotsky in Exile, Weiss highlights the eyes as an opening on nature, the site of “vision” through which the bodied subject extends its field of sentience into the external; to “turn yourself inside out” is both to transform the claims of corporeality so that the external world is seen anew, and (conversely) to recast vision in a way that seems actually to refashion the body and its senses—making them more genuinely “human,” to recall Marx's vision of non-alienated faculties. In terms of oneself and others, the path of revolutionary change lies directly through the body, as it impedes both action and political sight and as it presents itself for both punishment and remaking.

This attitude toward the body, of course, is counterpointed within Marat/Sade by a rival political anatomy, one which reverses the vision/body hierarchy advocated by Marat. The Marquis de Sade mocks Marat's political stance with a radical corporealism, rejecting even the possibility of transcendent self-extension “beyond the body”: “[A]s I sat there in the Bastille […] I learned that this is a world of bodies / each body pulsing with a terrible power / each body alone and racked with its own unrest” (92). Sade rewrites the French Revolution in terms of the atomic body, materially and spiritually isolated from anything but its own appetite, its experiential self-regard. Political agitation, revolutionary action—all mask a body moored in itself, relieved only by moments of orgiastic release and by the prospect of its own annihilation. “[T]he only truths we can point to / are the ever-changing truths of our own experience” (31): in this rewriting, the Bastille becomes an emblem, not of personal and social liberation, but of an irremediable incarceration within the body's walls:

Marat
these cells of the inner self
are worse than the deepest stone dungeon
and as long as they are locked
all your revolution remains
only a prison mutiny
to be put down
by corrupted fellow-prisoners

[93]

To a Marat who insists “We can't begin to build till we've burnt the old building down” (58), Sade charges “So they storm all the citadels / and there they are / and everything is just the same” (61).

The corporeal reduction underlying Sade's epistemological and pragmatic nihilism is reinforced in Marat/Sade's multiple dialectic by the play's asylum staging. By directing the assassination of Marat within this institution, and by casting the physically and mentally disordered as his main characters, Sade establishes the suffering body as his primary performative site, actualizing in theatrical terms the psycho-physiological as the locus of political action. The screams, wails, and gyrations that establish the play's mise-en-scène confront the forestage action with an anarchy of bodily constraint and release, linking the political issues surrounding the French Revolution to the body's tormented agitation.²³ Corday's political assassination becomes erotic play, and the Revolution itself a sublimated form of “general copulation” (92). Within such a performance context, the problem of Marat's own corporeality receives heightened attention: played by a paranoiac, Marat is portrayed already deep within the physiological absorption of disease, and the perceptual contraction effected by his fever and itching is underscored by the circumscribed boundaries of his bathtub. Sade taunts him: “Lying there / scratched and swollen / your brow burning / in your world your bath / you still believe that justice is possible” (56), and the Marat he directs is subject to distraction, delirium, and the flight of sense when even words lose their projective meaning: “And now / doubt / Why does everything sound false” (84). From the point of view of this vulnerable physicality, one of Marat's early speeches becomes richly problematic:

Simonne Simonne
my head's on fire
I can't breathe
There is a rioting mob inside me
Simonne
I am the Revolution

[16]

Like the play as a whole, these lines stand poised between the macrocosmic and microcosmic, between a Marat who assumes the Revolution through political self-transcendence, and a Marat who stages the Revolution inside—with pain and its disturbance his actors, and the private “body politic” his mise-en-scène.

This conflict between externalization and embodiment, political transformation and corporeal fixity, reflects the complex representational dialectic at work in Marat/Sade. The claims of vision and intervention find their theatrical form in Brechtian presentation—interruption of action by debate, multiple alienation of actor from role, superimpositions of historical time, and the inclusion of a discursive epilogue (cut from the 1965 Peter Brook production and missing from English editions of the play) where the characters clarify their political stances. Weiss has given evidence that his move into documentary theater, and into history as dramatic subject, was in part motivated—like his Trotsky's internationalism—by a desire to escape the limitations of corporeal perspective. In both their literal and figurative phrasings, his theoretical statements reveal an artistic/political concern with the body as a self-circumscribing impediment to vision—“Instead of showing reality in its immediacy, the documentary theater presents an image of a piece of reality torn out of its living context”—and with staging history: “When I take a theme that is altogether contemporary, it often turns out to be very one-sided, for all I have is the world that immediately surrounds me, and this limits me.”²⁴ The Brechtian devices in Marat/Sade and elsewhere in Weiss's plays acquire particular urgency within the theater, that other field animated and perceived by corporeal subjects, and in light of the vulnerability of ideational structures to the bodies of both performer and spectator. Weiss's Trotsky, after all, concludes his speech to Lenin on the body's claims to attention with a theatrical analogy that highlights, with striking directness, the risks of spectatorship, and the fragility of enactment:

Everything at times like on a huge stage. When I first went to the theater, Ilych, it was overwhelming. Indescribable. Out of my mind nearly at what was going on. Sat through all the intervals in case I might miss something. Afterwards they asked me: what did you see? I couldn't say. What had I seen? What had I seen?

[52]

Yet despite his anxiety about the body's assertiveness, Weiss refuses to silence the voice of physiology: his revolutionary theater is grounded in corporeal life, and in the body's ambiguous presence to itself and its world. The claims of the body—ecstatic, afflicted, self-projective, isolated—find expression through the spectacular staging of Marat/Sade, influenced by Artaud and by the Revolution's own Theater of Cruelty, its visual animation powerfully disruptive of Brechtian detachment. That Weiss's declared interpretation of the play moved from the spectacular to the Brechtian, from Sade to Marat, does not diminish the body's claims within his drama of political vision, and its claims to attention both as spectacle and as imprisoned site of a vanishing world.²⁵

VIOLENCE AND THE TRAUMA OF REPRESENTATION: BOND'S LEAR

The performance field of Edward Bond's plays is one of the most materially and perceptually complex in the contemporary theater. On the one hand, Bond's theatrical landscapes are characterized by a spaciousness of setting unmatched since Ibsen, a geographic expansiveness mapped through seas, rivers, fields, woods, the grounds of country estates, narrow roads to the deep north, the blanket of nuclear winter. In even the urban settings of The Pope's Wedding, Saved, and The Cat, Bond's scenic arena is liable to sudden openings, onto cricket greens, parks, lakes, rooftops. At the same time, and despite their relative paucity of stage props, Bond's plays feel distinctively heavy on stage, much more so than the materially dense performance arenas of Pinter's The Caretaker, Mamet's American Buffalo or Brenton's The Churchill Play. The locus of this weight is the human body, rendered inert by a degree of onstage suffering beyond anything attempted by Bond's contemporaries. “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners,” Bond has written, and his plays stage the consequences of this violence as it is mostly described in The Investigation and Marat/Sade.²⁶ Corpses hanging on the gallows in Early Morning, the workman's dead body lying onstage at the opening of Lear, bodies battered in a makeshift boxing ring in The Fool—the suffering body asserts its physicality within Bond's dramatic world through sheer number, and through the subjective weight of its pain. Physicality and the sentience of pain occupy, transfix Bond's stage, endowing it with a density like that of the stones which feature so prominently throughout his plays. Even the ghosts in these plays have a strange, agonized solidity, as though the spirit were itself a suffering body at one remove.

This obsession with the body reflects the radically biological materialism that underlies Bond's theater, a materialism that grounds the political and the economic in human corporeality. Bond looks not to statistics, institutions, or abstractions, but to the body for the signs of power and the marks of its operation. Like Weiss, Bond explores power as a claim on the body, as the usurping right to turn the body into its sign: the dismembered remains of Shogo's naked body are nailed to a placard in Narrow Road to the Deep North, the Young Woman's gibbeted body hangs in the background in Bingo, Paul's body is staged for execution in The Swing, the child Astyanax is thrown publicly from the Trojan battlements in The Woman. But power (and the conditions it both maintains and reflects) etches itself on human corporeality in less overt ways, and these plays of a writer who has claimed that “[t]ension and aggression are even becoming the markings of our species” repeatedly attempt to “read” the staged body for the signs of power's institutional operations.²⁷ The mutual devouring of capitalist society is literalized as cannibalism in Early Morning, and the Parson's own body displays his privilege when he is stripped and accused by the indigent locals in The Fool: “Where you stole that flesh boy? Your flesh is stolen goods.”²⁸ Whether it originates in open infliction or in more covert operations, violence in Bond's plays is power rendered apparent on the body.

As in Weiss's drama, this interest in the often searing inscriptions of power of human corporeality, its semiological operation, forms part of a broader understanding of the biological as site of political contest. For the body in Bond's plays represents not simply a slate for the marks of power, but a politicized interface between subject and world. In his preface to Lear, Bond discusses this contact between the body and its environment in terms of “biological expectation”: “What ought we to do? Live justly? But what is justice? Justice is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved. Human beings have an emotional and physical need to do so, it is their biological expectation” (10). Society is constituted equitably when it meets the criterion of “biological justice” (9), when it allows its individuals the assurances that the unborn child expects: “that its unpreparedness will be cared for, that it will be given not only food but emotional reassurance, that its vulnerability will be shielded, that it will be born into a world waiting to receive it, and that knows how to receive it” (6). A society organized in such a way allows the creation of culture as an expression of human need grounded in biological life; a society that fails to meet these biological criteria—such as the contemporary one, with its unjust institutions and the “technosphere” with which it supplants the “biosphere” (10)—denaturalizes human behavior and fosters a cycle of aggressivity where individuals inflict upon one another a violence resulting from their own biological victimization.²⁹

The violence in Bond's plays, in other words, derives from and is directed toward the individual's physical commerce with his or her environment. Against the “world” that power seeks to unify under its operations, bodies offer discrepant “worlds,” the autonomous landscapes of an incarnate subjectivity that realizes, indeed creates, itself through the satisfaction of its needs and the implementation of its desires. Lear represents a particularly intricate exploration of this conflict as it plays itself out in both individual and social terms. The adaptation of a play that also explores the political body, Bond's version of Shakespeare's story dramatizes the control which violence seeks to exert over the biologically-grounded subject, and the transformations it seeks to inflict. As a result of this concern with the suffering body, it also foregrounds the disrupting presence of pain within the Brechtian framework of Bond's “rational” theater.

Violence is organized in Lear through a pattern of enclosure, enacted both socially and personally. On the broadest political level, Lear precipitates the downfall of his kingdom by building a wall, a demarcation initiated to keep the enemy out but which, like the organized enclosures of land in Bingo and The Fool, creates hardships for his subjects and polarizes opposition from without. Descending through the play's spheres of action, one encounters a narrowing or enforced enclosure, a “circle that never stops getting smaller” contracting toward the boundaries of bodily containment.³⁰ This confinement is brought about, most obviously, through incarceration, a motif that runs powerfully through all of Bond's plays (Nazi imprisonment in Summer, Ismene's immuring in The Woman, bodies trapped within rubble in The War Plays). In Lear, the bodies of Warrington and the Gravedigger's Boy are thrown into the well, Lear and his daughters are imprisoned, prisoners march chained together. But these instances of external imprisonment reflect a more fundamental incarceration on the level of the body itself: the perceptual enclosure effected by pain, and a cancellation of the subject's ability to extend itself within the space it inhabits and thereby humanize this space according to its presence. If the senses constitute the means of access to the world, the registers of this world upon the human subject and the primary instruments by which this subject seeks to externalize itself within its environment, then the violence that seems to subsume all else in Lear seeks to attack the individual's spatializing gestures at their origin. The piercing of Warrington's eardrums and the blinding of Lear (effected through the grotesque technology of the blinding machine) emblematize the more pervasive incarceration of the subject within the body's limits, an enforced embodiment achieved through the “radical subjectivity” of pain.³¹ As elsewhere in Bond, the ultimate aim of this affliction is a penetration of damage to the innermost registers of subjectivity, a reversion of even this field to the material self-reference of objects. As the torture of Warrington and the rape of Cordelia in Lear suggest, power manifests its signs through its claim over the body's very interiority, a claim given anatomical emblem in the autopsy opening Fontanelle's body to view.³² With this ability, power renders the center of bodied subjectivity inanimate, objectival, inert. In the moments before Bodice pokes her knitting needles into Warrington's ears, Fontanelle jumps on his body in sadistic exultation: “Kill it! Kill all of it! Kill him inside! Make him dead!” (28).³³ “We must shut him up inside himself,” says Bodice (29), and the effect of their bodily violation is to turn Warrington into “[w]alking offal” (30). These images reflect the reversion of interiority to the purely organic, the effacement of “I”—as locus of subjectivity, in all its self-possessed abstraction—within the material.

Like all of Bond's plays, Lear circles obsessively around the moment of death, when the annihilating spasm of violence is successful and the animated body—once speaking, gesturing, spatializing its world—is rendered inert. But this reduction is only the culmination of a broader process that occupies the play as a whole: the deepening entrapment of the subject within the sphere of materiality, an interiorization that accompanies (and counterpoints) the increased excitations of pain. Lear's recurrent references to animals in cages reflect both the external imprisonment to which he is subjected and the more fundamental bodily incarceration which constitutes the target and the perceptual mode of pain. The self-confined nature of this entrapment is underscored in Lear's lament in the final act, when he appropriates the image of the wall as symbol for the suffering body: “What can I do? I left my prison, pulled it down, broke the key, and still I'm a prisoner. I hit my head against a wall all the time. There's wall everywhere. I'm buried alive in a wall. Does this suffering and misery last for ever?” (94). Lear's gaze in a mirror symbolizes the enforced narcissism of pain, an imprisoning circuit of attention that only intensifies when his eyes are lost. A collapse of subjective field imposed from without, this reversion of subject to body constitutes power's primary achievement, an obliteration of the personal and its reconstitution as object within power's field.

It is important not to restrict this pain, and its transgressive operation upon both body and consciousness, to the fiction dramatized by Bond's actors. Pain reaches across the boundary separating stage and author (“I find the actual business of writing almost painful,” Bond has said, “like touching something hot”), as well as the boundary between stage and audience.³⁴ Even in its dramatized forms, pain violates the perceptual demarcations and the differential spheres of “otherness” essential to representation, including the spectator within its discomfort through a kind of neuromimetic transferal (the impulse to close one's eyes during simulated blindings onstage reflects, not simply an aversion to the sight of pain, but also a deeper defense against its sympathetic arising within the field of one's own body). Bond has theorized this transgression of the audience-play boundary under the label “aggro-effect,” setting discomfort in contrast to the almost exclusive privileging of rationality within Brechtian theory: “In contrast to Brecht, I think it's necessary to disturb an audience emotionally, to involve them emotionally in my plays.”³⁵ Though Bond's description focuses on the emotions, his coinage (designed to offer an alternative to Brecht's “A-effect”) reflects a more physiological grounding: “aggro” suggests both aggressivity and aggregation; both connotations point to a physical discomfort, cramped and edgy, rooted in a suffering that the audience is made to share. That this effect constitutes a mode of bodily intervention is further suggested by Bond's remarks on art: “Society is a surgeon operating on [it]self and art is part of that operation.”³⁶

The portrayal of pain that constitutes Bond's theatrical “surgery” poses risks given the playwright's avowed dramaturgical aims; indeed, much of the power of Bond's plays lies in this problematic extremity of the suffering body and in a corporeal intrusion that Brecht's theater sought to minimize. In Bond's theory of performance, the vicarious infliction of audience discomfort activates a rationality to which it is ultimately subordinated: “[t]he shock is justified by the desperation of the situation or as a way of forcing the audience to search for reasons in the rest of the play.”³⁷ Theoretically, the depiction of pain is subsumed within the broader system of representation governing the play, constituting merely the most extreme point within the representational continuum of what Bond has called his “rational theater.” But this formulation risks underrepresenting the disruptiveness of pain within a dramaturgy of rational detachment, and the effect of its urgency on intellectual analysis. For pain is marked by its excessiveness, by a surplus that swamps the representational structures erected to contain it. Like the sea that reappears throughout Bond's plays, pain is characterized by receding horizons, passing beyond the boundaries of articulation toward deeper regions of sentience. This pain tends to overcome its enactment, mocking the disbelief that would relegate it to an actor's performance or refer it to the safety of a playwright's script. The enactment of pain within Lear and Bond's other plays asserts itself with visceral certainty, as a trauma suddenly and physically erupted, with a subjectively-located reality that exceeds the attempt to figure it externally. Although the suffering body serves as emblem, a material reification of power's hold over the body, pain itself annihilates abstraction, transfixes consciousness on its own insistent facticity. Anthony Kubiak observes that “[a]lthough terror can only occur in history, it is felt as a naked singularity, existing outside all possible representation.” As Bond himself says, “A scream from a wounded man is not rhetorical.”³⁸

As the representational orderings of its own world collapse within the contracted sphere of sentience, therefore, the suffering body subjects the plane of theatrical representation to similar (if often momentary) rupture. From this perspective, one might speak of enacted pain as a “trauma of representation,” whether that representation be organized according to illusionistic or epic tenets. The staging of this pain may indeed lead to outrage, reflection, political will. But unlike the measured, alienated representations of physical suffering in Brecht's theater, offered to rational digestion, its unmeasured portrayal on Bond's stage risks transfixing the stage with its agonized presence. The violent audience reaction to Saved (and the high walkout rate for other, especially earlier, Bond plays) suggests the risks posed to a rationally-articulated mise-en-scène by the evocation of pain and its aversiveness.

The staging of pain presents a further destabilization within Bond's theater of committed reason. As theorized by Bond, the enactment of human suffering and its vicarious replication in the audience serves to motivate action within the politico-economic sphere that fosters and institutionalizes this suffering. The witnessing of pain, in other words, is an awakening to political awareness and intervention, within “the world we prove real by dying in it” (Author's Preface to Lear, 12). But to the extent that this witnessing is itself a vicarious re-experiencing of pain, a mimetic inhabiting of the suffering body, it finds itself subject to the perceptual modulations effected by pain. As we saw in our discussion of Weiss, these modulations operate in contrary directions, tending not only toward a radical materialization of the body as object, but toward an equally radical derealization of the world itself. As sentience contracts within the circle of pain and the bodied subject is displaced by body as object, the subject/body/world continuum is characterized by increasing disengagement: the body toward thingness, and both subject and world toward a condition of disembodiment. Pain annihilates abstraction as an extension from bodily experience, but it also reinstates abstraction of a different order in its aftermath: the abstraction of a subject detached from the violated body, and of a world no longer available to the body's sensory reifications. Like other Bond plays, Lear is peopled by ghosts, the dead-but-not-dead, who represent (among other things) a subjectivity detached from the moorings of biological life. And like the other plays, Lear explores the perceptual detachment from nature and society that exists as a corollary of pain, a vision of the human body against vast emptiness that recurs with Shakespeare walking through the snowy field in Bingo, and Hecuba and Mary facing the sea in The Woman and Summer. Describing his forced march with other prisoners, Lear recounts his perceptions: “There was so much sky. I could hardly see. I've always looked down at the hills and banks where the enemy was hiding. But there's only a little strip of earth and all the sky” (69). As Weiss's Trotsky discovers in moments of bodily duress, the world of action and efficacy gives way to a perceptual blankness, disengaged from history and freed from its suffering—a detachment from the material whose quasi-mystical overtones are represented most consciously, in Bond's work, by the hermit/poet Basho in the opening scenes of Narrow Road. In terms of the life-world of the bodied subject, to die in the world is (for Bond's characters) to prove it unreal, to effect its disappearance within a self-emptying phenomenal world.

The very pain that objectifies the human body in its material being, in other words, also dereifies the world as it exists for the subject, both imprisoned within and distanced from a body rendered alien in its sentient materiality. Lear envisions escape from this imprisonment—“The animal will slip out of its cage, and lie in the fields, and run by the river, and groom itself in the sun, and sleep in its hole from night to morning” (54)—and seeks to begin this liberation by tearing down the wall of compulsory enclosure. Such moments have obvious political import: the burden of action and social reconstruction falls on those who remain, and on those (on stage and off) who witness the revolutionary gesture. But the complexity of social organization that the play has dramatized leaves little room for the primitivism underlying Lear's vision of escape, or for the pastoralism that represents its nearest social equivalent: the farm that Cordelia wishes to protect with a fence is vulnerable to the outside world, and in combating this world, Cordelia appropriates the dehumanizing violence to which she was subjected. Beyond this, the call to action and change, with its implicit faith that the walls of enclosure can be torn down and the cycle of violence ended, is counterpointed (in Lear and in Bond's work as a whole) by the insurmountable enclosure of corporeality itself, and by the disengagements of self-alienated embodiment. Against his urgings that the world be changed, rendered just, Bond dramatizes the erasure of this world within the canceling gestures of pain. Cordelia directs her troops in their war of liberation, but Bond's attention in Act 2, scene 3 is on the Wounded Soldier, and on his dematerializing, extinguishing world as it is known from within: “It's dark, there are stars … look […] The stars … Look … One … Two … Three … [Silence.]” (59).

Biological justice is problematic in Bond's theater, not only because (as Brecht might say) we're not good enough yet, but also because of the difficult fact of human embodiment, through which the subject is both self-transcending in acts of individual and social creation and bounded by its suffering corporeality. This body asks to be confronted on its own, paradoxical, terms—as a phenomenal zero-point within the world of which, objectively observed, it forms only a part. Like Peter Weiss, Edward Bond stages the politics of this embodiment, and the implications of its voices: the voice of self-projections, and the annihilating voice of pain. And like Weiss, Bond confronts the problem of embodiedness for representation itself: the fact that the body, subject to biological exigency, subsumes narrative and ideological pattern as readily as it does its own disembodying self-projections, engulfing representational ordering within the vortices of self-regard that characterize sentience. Both dramatists seek to incorporate this problematic sentience within their analysis of political interaction, and to reconfigure political issues within a corporeal intersubjectivity. Pursuing dramatic subjects and representational modes appropriate to this reconfiguration, both dramatists complicate the Brechtian project by grounding their plays in the bodied subject, suffering and whole, and in the precarious anatomy of its political and theatrical worlds.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 156; Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, English version by Geoffrey Skelton, verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 91.

2. Edward Bond, “On Brecht: A Letter to Peter Holland,” Theatre Quarterly 8 (Summer 1978): 34; Heiner Müller, quoted in Klaus Völker, “Brecht Today: Classic or Challenge,” Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 433.

3. For discussions of these currents of the post-Brechtian, see Philip Auslander, “Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre,” Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 20-34; Janelle Reinelt, “Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama,” Theatre Journal 38 (1986): 154-63; Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” The Drama Review 32 (Spring 1988): 82-94; Joel Schechter, “Beyond Brecht: New Authors, New Spectators,” in Beyond Brecht/Über Brecht hinaus, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 43-53; and David Bathrick, “Patricide or Re-generation?: Brecht's Baal and Roundheads in the GDR,” Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 434-47. See also Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London: Routledge, 1989).

4. Trevor Griffiths, Occupations, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1980), 17.

5. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). This article owes much to Scarry's powerful conceptualization of the suffering body, the relationship between embodiedness and self-extension, and the political exploitations of pain.

6. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), 152.

7. Georg Büchner, Danton's Death, in The Complete Collected Works, trans. Henry J. Schmidt (New York: Avon, 1977), 67.

8. On the politics of the “carnivalesque” body, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Joel Schechter discusses the political tradition of clown theater on the modern stage in Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).

9. Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy (Sussex: Harvester; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1984), 70.

10. Bertolt Brecht, Baal, trans. William E. Smith and Ralph Manheim, in Collected Plays, vol. 1, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, 1971), 31; The Threepenny Opera, trans. Ralph Manheim and John Willett, in Collected Plays, vol. 2, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, 1977), 177. On the scientific foundations of Brecht's theatre, see David Roberts, “Brecht and the Idea of a Scientific Theatre,” in Brecht: Performance/Brecht: Aufführung, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, John Willett, and Carl Weber (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 41-60. Roberts writes: “The individual as object and not subject of events is not only the constant theme of [Brecht's] plays, it determines the method [of] presentation of figures and events as objects of investigation, whose formula from the mid-thirties on was the term alienation” (42).

11. Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 92. Elsewhere, Brecht has written: “It is only after walking all around the entire episode that he can, as it were by a single leap, seize and fix his character, complete with all its individual features” (“A Short Organum for the Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre, 200).

12. Ibid., 200-01.

13. Throughout Brecht's theoretical writings, images associated with bodily appetite denote a surrender to empathy conceived in physiological terms, a mimetic engulfment in the body's life: the Dramaturg of The Messingkauf Dialogues says of Brecht's theater: “His actors weren't waiters who must serve up the meat and have their private, personal feelings treated as gross importunities”; see Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1965), 71. The very image of a “culinary theater,” and its attendant dismissal, suggests Brecht's mistrust of a theatrical experience grounded in corporeality.

14. Because of the range and complexity of the attendant issues, this article will forego discussion of the politics of embodiment as it is engaged within the equally important field of gender representation.

15. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1964), 114, 156, 139, 182. For an analysis of embodiment and self-extension through labor in Marx's writings, see Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Technē in the Thought of Karl Marx, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), esp. 123-42, 217-69; and Scarry, The Body in Pain, 243-77. For discussions of Marxist thought from the perspective of corporeality and the “life-world,” see Ludwig Landgrebe, “Life-world and the Historicity of Human Existence,” in Phenomenology and Marxism, ed. Bernhard Waldenfels, Jan M. Broekman, and Ante Pažanin, trans. J. Claude Evans, Jr. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 167-204; and John O'Neill, “Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Marxist Scientism,” ibid., 276-304.

16. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 57. Scarry discusses “the human being's capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world” (5). Writing from the perspective of medical phenomenology, Herbert Plügge observes that “All things take their rise in the live body … since, phenomenologically viewed, perception is the indispensible presupposition for every emergence of all things in the world”; see “Man and His Body,” trans. Erling Eng, in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism, ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), 294.

17. Scarry writes: “[I]ntense pain … destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe” (The Body in Pain, 35). Anthony Kubiak observes that “[t]he moment of terror, like the instant of pain, is a moment of zero time and infinite duration. … In pain we experience history as pure subject, isolated and detached; we experience history, in other words, as a-historical”; see “Disappearance as History: The Stages of Terror,” Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 82. On the body's emergence as a “thing” within phenomenal self-perception, see Plügge, “Man and His Body.”

18. Edward Bond, Red Black and Ignorant, in The War Plays, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1985), 5.

19. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 35.

20. Peter Weiss, Trotsky in Exile, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 70; Trotsky repeats this gesture on 87 and 97.

21. On the history of public forms of penalty, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), esp. 3-14.

22. Weiss, Marat/Sade, 20, 49.

23. Weiss makes similar use of the agitated body in Trotsky in Exile, during the scene of the 1903 Brussels conference: “During the discussion there is constant unrest: some scratch themselves, stand up, wave their arms, kick their legs, throw books in corners. Now and again a participant wanders about like a sleep-walker” (25).

24. Peter Weiss, “Notes on the Contemporary Theater,” trans. Joel Agee, in Essays on German Theater, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: Continuum, 1985), 296; “Conversation with Peter Weiss,” trans. Joel Agee, Essays on German Theater, 303. The play's epilogue has been translated and published by Roger Gross in “Marat/Sade's Missing Epilogue,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 2 (1988): 61-67.

25. On Weiss's changing views of Marat/Sade, and the reflection of these attitudes in the play's early productions, see John R. P. McKenzie, “Peter Weiss and the Politics of ‘Marat/Sade,’” New Theatre Quarterly 1 (1985): 301-12; and Sidney F. Parham, “Marat/Sade: The Politics of Experience, or the Experience of Politics?” Modern Drama 20 (1977): 235-50.

26. Edward Bond, Author's Preface to Lear, in Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1978), 3. Page references to Bond's Preface and to Lear are to this edition.

27. Ibid., 8. Bond continues: “Many people's faces are set in patterns of alarm, coldness or threat; and they move jerkily and awkwardly, not with the simplicity of free animals.”

28. Edward Bond, The Fool, in Plays: Three (London: Methuen, 1987), 106.

29. Bond also discusses the socio-biological roots of aggression in “Drama and the Dialectics of Violence,” interview with the Editors, Theatre Quarterly 2 (January-March 1972): 9. Terry Eagleton addresses some of the inconsistencies in Bond's analysis of violence and human nature in “Nature and Violence: The Prefaces of Edward Bond,” Critical Quarterly 26 (Spring/Summer 1984): 127-35.

30. Edward Bond, Narrow Road to the Deep North, in Plays: Two, 188. Shogo is speaking.

31. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 50.

32. With this scene, Bond actualizes the image evoked by Shakespeare's Lear in the trial scene: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart”; see King Lear, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), III. vi. 76-77.

33. Peter Holland offers a fascinating discussion of the role of objects in Bond's theater, and their function as part of a general “objectifying” of characters; discussing Saved, Holland notes: “The action of reducing the human to an object allows it to be used as a pawn in the social transactions of the characters”; see “Brecht, Bond, Gaskill, and the Practice of Political Theatre,” Theatre Quarterly 8 (Summer 1978): 29.

34. Bond, “Drama and the Dialectics of Violence,” 11.

35. Edward Bond, “From Rationalism to Rhapsody,” interview with Christopher Innes, Canadian Theatre Review, no. 23 (Summer 1979): 113.

36. Edward Bond, “The Rational Theatre,” in Plays: Two, xv.

37. Bond, “From Rationalism to Rhapsody,” 113.

38. Kubiak, “Disappearance as History,” 82; Edward Bond, letter to Robert Brustein, 9 August 1972, in Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts, Bond: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 1980), 116. Bond retreats somewhat from the disruptive implications of this statement for his “rational” theater by evoking the notion of illustration: “it is a precise description of a situation, and is reduced to essentials.”