| The first phase of this project is an examination of certain scientific publications of the nineteenth century, namely Charcot's Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, and several articles published by phrenological experts in England, France, Italy and the United States. By identifying and codifying specific body contortions, gestures and facial expressions as outward indications of an "unreasonable mind," these publications reinforced a binary system for understanding the human condition, where the distinction between madness and reason was articulated through particular visual clues. This iconography of madness was further reinforced in acting guides published in the nineteenth century, in which the physical interpretation of madness was indicated according to a strictly defined performance code. This binary distinction between madness and reason broke down at the beginning of the twentieth century, as avant-garde dramatists began to explore theatre as an expression of the mad mind. Experimental artists throughout the century, such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras, examined madness from within, creating a performance space marked by fragmentation, hallucinations, and unstable signifiers. In his two short works Dis Joe and Pas moi, Beckett explores the ontological insecurities of isolated characters who appear to be in the process of becoming schizophrenic. In a related way, Genet creates in Les Bonnes and Les Negres a schizophrenic dynamic between the audience and the performers, whereby the characters deliberately conspire, through various theatrical ruses, to undermine the spectators' understanding of "reality." Duras's India Song also destabilizes conventional notions of what is "real" by presenting a dramatic world which gradually becomes contaminated by madness in a process similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as the realm of desiring-production. Through the lens of the theoretical speculations of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Deleuze and Guattari, the textual analyses reveal how these dramatists employ an aesthetic of madness in order to explore new ways to conceptualize reality and the human condition. |
