EAT ME:
AN UN/(RE)-MATERIALIZING THE MATERIAL ON THE STAGEA STUDY OF THE CANNIBALISTIC NATURE OF THE THEATRE;
OR,
THERE IS (NO) MATERIAL: THE TEXT AND THE BODY ARE THE SAME
By
Matthew Miles Bowman

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Literature in English
2012

ABSTRACT
EAT ME:
AN UN/(RE)-MATERIALIZING THE MATERIAL ON THE STAGEA STUDY OF THE CANNIBALISTIC NATURE OF THE THEATRE;
OR,
THERE IS (NO) MATERIAL: THE TEXT AND THE BODY ARE THE SAME
By
Matthew Miles Bowman
Cannibalism in drama collapses the gap between the performative word and the
performance of a text or body. It answers Antonin Artaud’s call for a new kind of theatre. He
calls this new kind of theatre one of Cruelty, i.e., one that shakes the audience out of passive
state vis-à-vis bourgeois, Western, narrative-based theatre. Artaud pushes for a recodified
theatrical language that does not depend upon language. His desire to circumvent spoken or
written language, however, cannot occur, a fact he even acknowledges as a possibility in his The
Theatre and Its Double. Cannibalism accounts for this inability by mediating the gap between
performance and the performative. It reconstitutes the body and the spoken and/or written word
in such a manner that the two are indistinguishable. Through a study of cannibalism in a
selection of twentieth-century dramatic texts, this project suggests that a Theatre of Cannibalism
might accomplish what Artaud is after, a life before birth, a consciousness before consciousness.

Copyright by
MATTHEW MILES BOWMAN
2012

DEDICATION
For Pops, who wrote this along with me.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have accomplished this project without the support of Dr. Michael Nealon, Dr. Paul
Jurczak, Jeff Janowick, Sharon Park, Doug Sjoquist, Molly Cryderman-Weber, Dennis
Hinrichsen, Andy Callis, Melissa Kaplan, Dr. Kevin Brown, Dr. Eric Snider, Tammy Vance, and
everyone in the Humanities and English Departments at Lansing Community College. My
deepest gratitude goes to my dissertation committee: Dr. Miguel Cabañas, Dr. Ann Larabee, and
Dr. Ann Folino-White. Thank you all for your patience and for giving me the most insightful
feedback one can ask for, especially on an ever-evolving project like this one. For the Chair of
my committee, Dr. Judith Roof, I cannot begin to thank you enough for your guidance,
encouragement, and confidence in this project. It is because of you I am where I am, and I will
never forget that. To Dr. Norm Gilbert, thank you for your kindness and motivation. And to my
brilliant and very good friend, Dr. Lance Norman, to you goes a special acknowledgment.
Without your wisdom, without your balanced approach to research, and without your certainty
that, although captivating, only the near opposite of this project’s thesis will do, I would not have
finished. For that, I am grateful. And to Erin, Mom, Pops, Lee, Harlee, Reese, and Rachel: Thank
you so much for your love and support.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………….1
CHAPTER 1…………………………………………………………………………………25
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER: (re)INSCRIBING THE BODY
VIA CANNIBALISM
CHAPTER 2…………………………………………………………………………………55
SARAH KANE’S BLASTED: THE PERFORMATIVE AND PERFORMANCE ARE THE
“SAME”
CHAPTER 3…………………………………………………………………………………92
DAVID GREIG’S SAN DIEGO: CANNIBALISM (THE PARATEXTUAL/THE
PARALEPTICAL) THROUGH THE AURAL
CHAPTER 4………………………………………………………………………………...128
THE PARATEXT AND CANNIBALISM IN FERNANDO ARRABAL’S THE
ARCHITECT AND THE EMPEROR OF ASSYRIA
CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………..157
THE PARALEPTICAL/THE PARATEXT: TITUS ANDRONICUS, ARTAUD, AND A
THEATRE OF CANNIBALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...172

vi

Introduction
Edward Bond’s 1968 play Early Morning answers Antonin Artaud’s call for a new kind
of theatre that “takes gestures as far as they will go” (TD 27) with a “physical language, aimed at
the senses and independent of speech” (TD 25). “Gestures” in this project applies to more than
just body movement or props, although Artaud does refer to these extensively in his The Theatre
and Its Double. For Artaud, this new theatre of reinvigorated or rewritten gestures should accost
the audience, and to paraphrase Derrida, the accosting shall elicit a kind of “death before birth”
(WD 233) or a “consciousness . . . before birth” (Artaud Anthology 190), i.e., an experience
through theatre that can erase codification outside the theatre. A recodified theatre is excessive; it
is excess, as he suggests. He states, “In its very gratuitousness, [ ] the action and effect of a
feeling in the theater appears infinitely more valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life” (25).
Excess does not dissolve, however, as Artaud later suggests (28). Excess is permanent, and once
spilled, it is unavoidably visible, especially in its invisibility. Gratuity can be understood, in part,
as an awareness, perhaps even as an hyperawareness, of watching a play as staged. Cannibalism
mediates this awareness.
For example, in Bond’s play, the material excess of the Siamese twins’ body cannot
dissipate, but once in heaven and separated, the older George feeds upon his headless brother
Arthur, per Arthur’s command. The representation of the metaphysical body in heaven is more
palpable and tangible in its undeniable physicality. Cannibalism in heaven rematerializes the
immaterial connection the two brothers have in speech. It is only in heaven that a separated
George is finally whole. Cannibalism inverts and twists how the body and representation
interact. This cannibalistic process goes on indefinitely, and it applies to the stage, as well as the
script on the page. Cannibalism recodes and reconstitutes what constitutes the material and what

1

does not; and, the gesture of cannibalism, in its various manifestations on stage and/or on the
page, takes gesture itself as far as it will go.
The performance of the body and its relationship to the performativity of language is a
cannibalistic performance and a cannibalistic performative. Unlike Artaud, who considers all
language as “[d]ialogue—something written and spoken—[which] does not specifically belong
to the stage but to books” (25), i.e., language represents, this project shows language does not
just represent. Language performs as the body does, and they both perform upon one another.
Language, like the material body, can have the ability to do things, i.e., to do what it also says, to
follow the theories of the philosopher J.L. Austin. Cannibalism mediates the performative nature
of language with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and the differences between the performative and
performance become rather difficult to discern.
Chapter One suggests cannibalism in Early Morning facilitates an inversion of how
spoken language and the body interact. A speaking body has no power in heaven. Rather than a
metaphysical body’s power to speak commands, it is a headless, dismembered Arthur who is
able to speak, “Feed them” (221), and it is done. The characters reabsorb his word only in a state
of cannibalism and disembodiment. However, they do not follow his word to the letter; they eat
each other, not of themselves, as Arthur commands. They have reconstituted both Arthur and his
word.
Cannibalism in Chapter Two mediates the relationship between the spoken and written
word vis-à-vis the body in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer. Catherine’s spoken
word re-members her cannibalized cousin, Sebastian, with his written poem that does not exist.
Both merge, reconstituting him. His life-long wish has been fulfilled: He is his own art.

2

Catherine’s spoken re-memberment of Sebastian cannibalizes his work with the feast-ful event.
The body of work and the body of Sebastian are one and the same, incessantly eating each other.
The cannibalism in Blasted is on the stage and on the page in an active, performative
way. Chapter Three examines how the gesture of cannibalism, or its spectre, on stage or in the
script, does not necessarily apply to how the script itself functions. The stage directions indicate
that the “/” denotes an overlap in dialogue. The mark never appears. It is absent. That absence
cannibalizes the presence of the text; in other words, the absent mark becomes as present as the
very visible script itself. It overlaps the cannibalism on stage and reconstitutes the play to the
point where the delineation of where the line of theatre begins and ends cannot be discerned.
Further, David Greig’s “Editor’s Note” that accompanies the play cannibalizes it. This
cannibalism is a paratextual and a parenthetical process. His announcement that the text you are
holding in your hands is THE text reconstitutes Kane’s play with his note. Greig, then, posits
himself in the text. Greig also posits himself in his play San Diego, in which he figures in a
myriad of manifestations, one of whom eats of his friend, Laura, at her command. The
playwright Greig, in the “Editor’s Note,” in Blasted, and the playwright Greig who writes Greig
into the play San Diego, parenthesizes the “Editor’s Note”; it is more important than the text
itself. It is more important, it is parenthetical because this project places it in such a way that it
cannibalizes.
In The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, cannibalism mediates itself. In Chapter
Four, cannibalistic gestures consume in Fernando Arrabal’s play. They reconstitute the
cannibalistic gestures that came before them. In a similar fashion, this project positions this play
in the last chapter so that it cannibalizes the Introduction. If the Introduction is a causally
motivated narrative, and it is, then the last chapter is a dismemberment of that narrative. The

3

Introduction calls for a new kind of theatre that realizes Artaud’s vision. The last chapter posits
not only that theatre is always-already cannibalistically performing, but also that it produces
nothing at all. Thus, a Theatre of Cannibalism is both a material and immaterial in-actuality that
does and does not apply to all and no theatre at all. Presence in absence begets more presence
reconstitutes absence with that presence, and so on. What power does theatre have in the wake of
cannibalism? Is it empowered or disemboweled? Or both? In other words, what happens to the
excess that Artaud rightfully postulates when the script and the stage dissect and reconstitute
each other? The format of this project attempts to answer those questions, to enact performative
cannibalism as an adjective and as a verb.
Epilogue
How does cannibalism function in Early Morning? Once dead and in heaven, the
character Arthur discovers that you have to eat people to “regrow,” to become present in absence
and vice versa. In Artaud’s theatre, the audience finds cruelty in the absence of recognizable uses
of theatrical language, especially the kind that lends itself to narrative. Thus, those types of
recognizable elements associated with the theatre do not stop with the word, but continue on to
the structure (or not) of the play, the theatre, and the consumer’s (audience member or reader)
relationship to both. Those recognizable elements, then, in Artaud’s theatre are to give way to
sounds, lights, and props which are to take on new powers that affect the audience. Physical
bodies on stage are to give way to metaphysical concepts, and metaphysical concepts should
become so tangible one can almost touch them. When Artaud says he is looking for a “death
before birth” through his Theatre of Cruelty, he wishes to discard older representing agents in
order to provoke the audience out of its seat. How does a sound performed enable theatrical

4

recoding, though, in its absence? In the absence of the sound, when read on the page, as a script,
the absence of an actual audible sound is more deafening than its presence could ever render.
Cannibalism’s excessive attention to the human form’s presence, that, in its absence, it
becomes more present than before, and in this kind of retroactive performativity, sound, or any
other mechanisms put forth on the stage (or not) or the page (or not) in a theatre of cruelty, like
language, still resonates with the self-sustaining, older systems of habits that creates or consumes
them. Cannibalism in Early Morning uniquely performs those very same habits (how to consider
violence on stage, the taboo of the act, etc.) in such a way, however, that language, in its
excessive presence at the beginning of the play, produces a literal dematerialization of Arthur’s
metaphysical body in heaven (he is a talking head), at the end of the play. Further, the body, in
its excessive presence at the end of the play, produces a figurative rematerialization of the once
physically joined Siamese twins, Arthur and George. The performativity of the word overlapped
with the performance of the body produces a new, un-utterable, in-expressible but active theatre.
Arthur’s disembodied head in heaven, for example, speaks, and it is because of this
disconnection, coupled with his command to the others, “Feed them,” that compels them to eat.
Somehow, his words do more when his body is not. For Arthur, his saying literally enacts the
doing, and all of this occurs before he commits a death before birth (he commits suicide in
heaven):
VICTORIA. You can’t kill people in heaven. They can only kill themselves.
GRISS. No speeches.
VICTORIA. You’re hungry.
LEN. ‘Oo says?
VICTORIA. He did. That’s why he killed himself.

5

JOYCE. Do what?
VICTORIA. He told you not to eat each other.
..................
But he knew he was asking something unnatural and impossible.
Something quite, quite impossible. And because he loved you—and
he only attacked you out of love—he wouldn’t ask you to eat yourself,
as he did. . . . So he died, to let you eat each other in peace.
GRISS. Fact?
.................
VICTORIA. His last words were “Feed them.”
(221)

In this scene, hunger is no longer associated with pain, as Victoria exclaims when they all first
arrive in heaven, “Nothing has any consequences here—so there’s no pain” (200). Hunger is not
a result of, a representation of something not happening (eating); it is an activity, a habit, of
nothing happening all the time (being full without getting one’s fill). Cannibalism showcases,
both in terms of the language that represents it and in terms of the act itself, the ability to
reconsider the distance between doing something, whether in terms of the word or in terms of
action, and between representing something collapses.
Without its typical sign of pain, hunger no longer fills but simply temporarily
reconstitutes one body with another. The absence of pain in its apparent but redefined presence
in heaven, then, condenses the differences between the material body and the representing agents
that code the body in/the body of the theatre (on the page and on the stage) together to such a
degree that Arthur’s earlier self-consumption to which Victoria refers is the real performance of

6

the play: hyperbolically, it uses the habits of representation to expose the arbitrary manner by
which the body and the word are differentiated in the first place.
For example, George’s reading from his mother’s note in the first half of the play not
only puts his mother center-stage, it also cauterizes his mother to him. They are quite
indistinguishable, metaphysically. Arthur’s presence, though, simultaneously destroys the
metaphysical link by reiterating the physical, over the represented. Arthur is joined at the hip
with George, physically. Arthur’s presence augments George’s absence as a human being. His
reading guarantees his and Victoria’s umbilical-like metaphysical link. George’s dead corpse, his
absence as a moving entity enunciates his physicality to the audience and his metaphysicality to
Arthur: He just can’t seem to live without him. In heaven, in Arthur’s metaphysical absence,
George finally can eat Arthur, who had previously attempted to eat himself to avoid cannibalism
as an economy for others, now guarantees a perpetual gratuity in the consumption, over and over
again, of others.
The play, too, reconstitutes itself by reframing and recoding the Siamese twins, Arthur
and George, a paratextual body in the first portion of the play, become parenthetical asides in
heaven. The difference between the two brothers becomes a matter of what matter is, exactly,
and in heaven, if cannibalism is the new economy, and it does not seem to work, exactly as the
characters think it ought in any case. It is the habit of eating that continues, not necessarily what
it abates, but what it does. The habit of pain goes, so the habits of activity continue. Cannibalism
on stage becomes a new kind of habit, and this project will examine a selection of twentiethcentury dramatic works that exhibit cannibalism in a variety of ways in order to show how a shift
in habits can evoke what Artaud may have been after, a theatre with gestures that are both
performative and a performance. Cannibalism mediates this language.

7

This new language shifts focus from the material to the ephemeral in Early Morning,
from George as a conjoined and living skeletal prop in the first half of the play, for example, to
George as a physically independent zombie with a desire for human flesh in heaven in the second
half of the play, a zombie who must eat his brother to be (w)hole again. Victoria and George
continually complain that George cannot be complete without Arthur, the second, the aside. This
(in)complete-ness, how the stage conveys the connections between the physical and the
immaterial, is what this dissertation wants to examine via the use of cannibalism in a selection of
twentieth-century plays. In Early Morning’s case, on the surface, not only does the play
challenge conventional rules of the (im)material by inverting the values and processes that makes
the life of the first half of the play human(e), but it also questions the nature of how theatrical
representing agents function in their, to paraphrase Artaud, death before birth.
After the deaths of all the characters, it is in heaven where it is not George, but rather
Arthur who is able to affect the others with his dismembered body (eventually “he,” that is, his
talking, body-less head ends up underneath Florence’s dress). In heaven, cannibalism is the
economy through which growth, or as the characters put it, through which “regrowth” occurs.
Before entering, Arthur must undergo a trial, and Victoria presides as judge, who commands
Albert to perform a “trial by ordeal” (199), as the Foreman exclaims, or, as Victoria sentences,
“The usual formality” (199):
Albert sticks the sword into Arthur. Arthur does not react. A slight pause.
Albert pulls the sword out.
VICTORIA (sniffs). Do I smell burning?
ALBERT. The verdict?
FOREMAN. Guilty and admitted to heaven.
Albert cuts Arthur from George with the sword. There are loud shouts from the
8

crowd . . . Len runs downstage carrying a leg. It is torn off at the thigh and still
wears its sock and shoe. The stump is ragged and bloody. Len chews it. The
crowd fight round him like sparrows.
CROWD. Me! Me! Me!
LEN (fights them off by kicking at them, and swinging the leg). Lay off!
‘Ang about! Get the other one! (He chews.)
ALBERT. You’re interrupting a trial.
VICTORIA. It’s disgraceful . . .
CROWD. Me! Me! Shares!
LEN. ‘Old on, ‘old on. (He turns to Arthur.) Yer once did me a good turn.
Welcome t’ ‘eaven. It’s all yourn— (He wrenches a bite from the leg.)—
wass left of it. . . . An’ I ‘ope it chokes yer.
...............................
ALBERT. In heaven, we eat each other.
VICTORIA. It doesn’t hurt.
ALBERT. And it grows again.
GEORGE. Like crabs.
VICTORIA. Nothing has any consequences here—so there’s no pain. Think of
it—no pain. Pain is just a habit. You forget all your habits here. Bon
appetite.
(199-200)
Cannibalism is the only means by which regrowth can occur (apparently, this is an instinctual
desire all share, save Arthur). They must eat each other, eternally, not unlike the ninth circle of
Dante’s Inferno. Pain, as habit, suggests that it is not the body that counts, per se. It is the
inverse. It is the habit that counts. Pain is a habit. Representation is a habit. Victoria indicates
that in life this repetitive pattern of pain, of representation, is an effect, not a cause. In heaven,
the inverse is true. This project proposes that Artaud’s so-called Theatre of Cruelty can be
9

effected by understanding J.L. Austin’s theories regarding the performative power of words
anew. In other words, this project considers language and the body as interchanging and
interchangeable, as they are embodied and enacted in anthropophagical acts.
Early Morning suggests that this recoding occurs in a kind of pre-death, accessible vis-àvis cannibalism. In life, after Florence poisons Albert and he returns from the dead, he insists that
even though Arthur is second, he ought to have been first, which implies that Arthur did not
work hard enough to beat out the dumber George for his rightful position, reinscribing,
reiterating Arthur’s obligation to succeed, due to his obvious failure in the womb. Now, more
than ever, Arthur must salvage the country, the family honor, and now that George is even
dumber than before, must serve as usurping, matricidal, fratricidal King. Albert yells:
Kill the Queen. Make yourself King. Let the country live in peace. Let
us die in peace.
ARTHUR. George is King!
ALBERT. Kill him too!
ARTHUR. No!
ALBERT. This is why you came here.
ARTHUR. No! It was an accident. We came in a circle—
ALBERT. You came so that I could cut him off! (George whimpers. Albert
comes slowly down from the gravestone as he talks.)
(167)
In heaven, it is not chronology that determines rank. In heaven it is the evidence that cannot be
seen, the eating and regrowing, that proves, not rank, but existence. George cannot exist
with(out) Arthur. This existence depends upon anthropophagic activity. If this action does not
occur, then, George feels the representation, the habitual happenings of the body, physically.
Even in death, in his spiritual form, the habit returns. What is it about cannibalism that quells his
10

fear of non-existence? What is it about cannibalism that spurs regrowth instead of termination?
In life, one can claim that the lines between object and subject blur when cannibalism occurs. In
heaven, how is this possible when there is no body? In Early Morning, cannibalism is the
economy by which existence persists. Theatre through cannibalism/cannibalism in theatre puts a
heaven on earth, so to speak in order to reexamine the relationship between words and the body.
Nowhere does the body show itself as a physical entity than in the beginning of the play.
The tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum-like figure(s), brothers Prince Arthur and Prince George,
hilariously appear in Scene Two in bed. The stage directions indicate that “George isn’t seen till
he wakes up” (141). First, Arthur wakes and speaks to his father Albert regarding the details
surrounding their planned regicide of Victoria. Then, George, the Prince of Wales, pops up from
under the covers, stupidly unaware of their plot. Because they do not get out of bed, it is not until
Scene Three that when “Arthur and George come on [ ] [i]t is seen that they are Siamese twins.
Bow” (143). I write “figure(s)” because the two brothers are one and (not) the same. (How do
Siamese twins sit up separately anyway?)
Their relationship is tenuous to say the least. Arthur continuously concerns himself with
the impossibilities of marriage. For example, while in bed in Scene Two he states:
I can’t marry! Have you thought of that?
GEORGE. That’s up to you.
ARTHUR (angrily). No it isn’t! How could I involve a woman in this unless
I was forced to? (Slight pause.) When you do marry we must stop
quarrelling. She’ll have enough to put up with without—
...........................
. . . I’m trapped!
(142)

11

It is not just that Arthur’s conjoined status with George precludes physical activity for him
(although they share the same heart, it is unclear whether or not they possess separate sexual
organs), but also that poor George has to do things like greet his future wife, Florence
Nightingale, for the first time by reading a note his mother gave to him, “Dear Miss Nightingale,
I welcome you to Windsor and hope you will be happy here” (144). Not only does George not
think for himself, but Arthur does not even get a note. Arthur is the aside, the parenthesis. The
afterbirth. Their father exclaims to Arthur, “You were first in the womb. Your mother screamed
and struggled and your brother thrashed his way out in front” (168), which explains why, when
Albert pleads for Arthur’s help now that Florence has poisoned him, “Arthur, I’m your father.
Help me!” (160), Arthur retorts, “You’re a liar” (160). Arthur’s humiliation stops once George is
shot in the face.
The Queen’s assassination fails, and when it does, someone injures George in a scuffle.
He wakes in Scene Six to the Doctor and Arthur arguing:
DOCTOR. The Prince of Wales is dying.
...................
I shall cut him free.
ARTHUR (looks at George). He’ll die.
DOCTOR. Yes, I give you my word.
ARTHUR. And I’ll live?
DISRAELI. Yes?
An officer comes in.
..........................
ARTHUR. I won’t cut my brother off.

12

..........................
DOCTOR. You’re in pain.
ARTHUR. It’s gone.
(164, 165)
The Doctor’s answer is a confirmation of an uncertain outcome. However, it also becomes an unuttered, simply interrupted, impregnated sans birth, response. A silent scream. It is a response
that is not a response, and the interruption manifests in the threat of an operation, of a separation,
and the apparent lamenting that Arthur exhibits earlier in the play suddenly turns into a rage, as
he desperately wishes to nurse his ailing brother back to health.
The once desire for separation becomes the present scapegoat Arthur uses to justify
George’s continued status as first in line. Arthur must be second. “Look at the signs!” Arthur
seems to exclaim. Despite the definitive proof that George is not well and must be sacrificed,
triaged, Arthur is not convinced of the Doctor’s plan. Despite the pain he denies feeling, Arthur
will not let go. Pain, apparently, is one signal, one representing agent that indicates it is time for
poor George to go. Even George himself politics for it:
The Doctor goes out.
GEORGE (frightened). Cut.
ARTHUR. No.
GEORGE. Breadboard.
ARTHUR. Walk.
GEORGE. Knifeboard.
ARTHUR. We’ll slip out through the secret passage.
GEORGE. Cut.
ARTHUR (opens trap). You’ll be all right . . . .
13

GEORGE (going down). Cut . . . Cut . . . Cut.
(165-66)
Arthur just will not do it. He rejects George’s command, despite the fact that George must be
obeyed, as he is first in line. The irony in this scene turns to absolute burlesque comedy as
George, after dying from a hunger strike, slowly decays and rots from scene to scene, until
eventually, he is a mere skeletal prop clinging to Arthur’s side. That prop introduces the idea that
there is more to the physical than the material body, and further, it reveals that there could be
consequences if commandments are not followed, or perhaps, rewards if they are. The command
manifests in the dematerializing and then rematerializing and then unmaterializing of the
physical body, and there does not appear to be any way “to tap into,” or not, the means to
command the command. One way or another, it seems, verbal commandments appear to apply to
the physical, but not the metaphysical, but in heaven, unspoken commands, only, consummate.
The verbal has no agency in heaven. Only the physical-imagined-matters.
Traditionally the metaphysical applies to the spiritual, the non-material; however, in
Early Morning, Arthur treats George’s dead body, that which can be seen, proven, mapped, as
something else entirely. It is not simply something that can be cut off; it is more than a part of
Arthur. In George’s death, an inversion occurs: George becomes more metaphysical and
indistinguishable from Arthur, for Arthur, than in life. The closer George is to confirming the
physicality of the body in his expiration, the further Arthur goes to deny the spiritual in order to
save the physical. “You don’t want to die, brother,” Arthur seems to say. “The meaning of your
life lies here, in the physical world where you can be more than just the Prince of Wales. You are
my brother, a part of me, me.” Ironically enough, for Arthur, the starving, dying, and then rotting
corpse of his brother produces George, as a brother, that is, a spiritual being for whom one must

14

feel sympathy. It is as if in Arthur’s reiteration of the body to the surgeon as that which cannot be
lost, in its absence, its presence dominates all the more.
Arthur rescinds his initial wish to physically separate from George, whose presence
actually lingers on more presently (metaphysically) in that physicality which cannot, or is not
supposed to be denied: George’s skeleton. So even though George as subject is dead, as object or
prop, he has more power over Arthur (he is more subjected to George) than when he was alive.
However, at no time is George as alive (save for being a skeletal prop) as when he reads his
mother’s note as the Prince of Wales to Florence. He is front and center. He is authoritative. He
is important, but it is the Queen, from the side of her son and on the stage, who receives the
focus. It is “her” note, or at least, the note she wrote that is being read aloud to Nightingale,
which exerts power, not to initiate the wedding between George (not Arthur too?), but between
herself and Florence. The subsequent cannibalism that occurs in the second half of the play in
heaven retroactively performs upon and unwrites the first half of the play wherein cannibalism of
the ephemeral body complicates the relationships between the material and the immaterial codes
set up in the first half of the play. Physically speaking, if their speaking renders a kind of doing,
it is direct and unrelated to the body, at least, less so than in the actual metaphysical where acting
and reading, become interchangeable, where, metaphysically speaking, there is only the
(im)material (indistinguishability between them) on stage.
The Queen’s words, read center stage, become the focus and the acting agent, in and out
of its author’s presence. Her words, disembodied and then doubly embodied in George/Arthur,
are literally center stage, pulling attention to Victoria, not George. Her words parentheticalize
George. Her words paratextualize him as well, as she addendums herself to the physical paratext
that is George/Arthur. Her words create an interchangeability that occurs via a simultaneous

15

process of paratextuality, because there is a kind of excess in these words that eventually,
inadvertently effect the lifeless but still conjoined physical body of George.
In the latter half of the play, as George finally eats his own living-dead brother,
cannibalism serves on another level as both a metaphor and as an act, for the power of the
spoken word shifts to the dismembered body, as author. In life, Arthur is impotent on multiple
levels. In death, his disconnected head has the ability to code a new economy: cannibalism, and
even though he rejects it at first, he finds middle ground, as it were, by eating (of) himself. His
disobedience, his outright defiance of the cannibalism code disrupts the first half of the play. At
first, it seems as if cannibalism is a metaphor for politics, or cultural dynamics, etc. The play
achieves this understanding by relying on the taboo, the ghost of cannibalism. “I understand that
cannibalism wouldn’t normally be a part of heaven. Even if it were, when juxtaposed with the
first half of the play, I understand that the first half is just as cannibalistic as the latter. People are
just as cannibalistic in life as they are in death.”
In Scene Nineteen, in heaven, Arthur and Florence express their feelings about their
predicament, and as they do so, the power of a theatre that recodes its own signs of
communication emerges:
ARTHUR. I’m tired.
FLORENCE. (sits) Why aren’t you happy?
ARTHUR. I’m in pain.
FLORENCE. I’m sorry, you can’t be. Not in heaven.
ARTHUR. You don’t feel pain.
FLORENCE. Sometimes I’m hungry. That’s all—They ate my arm.
It didn’t hurt. Eat me. Part of me.
ARTHUR. No.
16

FLORENCE. You do eat. Sometime’s George’s pains a bit better.
ARTHUR. I eat myself.
FLORENCE. O.
ARTHUR. When it’s too bad, I eat my arm. (He moves the back of his
forearm across his mouth and chews.)
FLORENCE. Does it hurt?
ARTHUR. Less than hunger.
..............................
My beard grew overnight. The night I ate my father. I ate some of him.
I don’t know what. When I woke up I was old. My hair was white and I
had a beard. It was white whe it came, and wet—I must have been crying.
I felt very tired, as if I’d been born with a beard.
.............................
Don’t eat.
FLORENCE. I—
ARTHUR. Most people die before they reach their teens. Most die when they’re
still babies or little children . . .
......................
Bodies are supposed to die and souls go on living. That’s not true. Souls
die first and bodies live. They wander round like ghosts . . . there must be
peace when you’re dead. Only I’m not dead.
(208-209)
Arthur indicates that the body’s demise confirms that representation must no longer function as
he once knew it. Arthur denies death, in death. On the one hand, pain is a register, a sign that you
are alive. On the other, it is, once in heaven, and as Victoria points out earlier, a habit. Habits can
be broken, and new habits can be adopted. On the other hand, hunger (which I typically associate
with a very specific kind of pain) Arthur and Florence separate as autonomous feelings. Florence
17

tells Arthur of his brother’s pain, which abates when, it seems, Arthur eats of human flesh.
“Sometimes George’s pain’s a bit better,” Florence says. Arthur replies, “I eat myself.”
Self-eating, though, does not cure George’s ailment. Arthur’s does. George’s is not a
satisfactory self-substitute. The body, Arthur’s body, does matter; however, because the body
cannot have matter in heaven; he cannot be killed. The act of eating will not do it either. It, too,
then, must be seen as yet another habit. So how is pain a habit, a representation that can, for all
extensive purposes, stop operating, while the act of eating is not, and does? The answer lies in
the relationship between the body and the word, i.e., that they are indistinguishable in nature, not
in name. This project will treat itself as both a representation and as a textual and physical body
in order to complicate and play with the interplay between the two. Cannibalism serves to expose
this interplay between the written and spoken word, and further, cannibalism, whether read from
the script or experienced in a theatre on stage (albeit with different effects), acts as a command
that comes about due to George’s words not being followed. The eating in heaven follows. The
failure to dismember on earth results in its ephemeral codification, where its consummation is a
foregone conclusion. This endless eating of others overpowers the original body, the original
body-sign economy. Cannibalism is the most extreme of gestures because it not only
overpowers, but in its specter on stage, and on the page, cannibalism offers a means to
understand how the theatre works by performing the very paradoxes that make it unique, i.e.,
absent gestures overwrite and then reconstitute present ones.
Preface
In Chapter One, cannibalism takes the form of absence; it manifests, not in retrospect,
but in a retroperformative fashion. Catherine Venable’s retelling of how street urchins ripped her
cousin, Sebastian, apart and then ate him alive on their summer vacation, cannibalizes him all

18

over again. Her talking, her words are performative. They perform the act of cannibalism upon
Sebastian; they perform Sebastian by reconstituting him as the cannibalized art object that he
always wanted to be. His mother, Mrs. Venable, explains that a “poet’s life is his art, and vice
versa” (12). Sebastian the immortal poet never published a single word. In fact, he never even
composed a single line of verse. The pages in his Poem of Summer that Mrs. Venable references
repeatedly are blank, a blank-ness with which he wished to be joined somehow in order to
become a living work of art, to cheat death by dying before birth. Ironically, through Catherine’s
speaking, he gets his wish. Her words do not just recapture an event, but they enact the event
upon Sebastian for everyone else. This recapitulating, reconstituting, and retroactive
performance of cannibalism renders a very present Sebastian on stage, especially in his absence.
Chapter Two considers the way by which cannibalism in Sarah Kane’s Blasted functions
via the reading of the play. Blasted enacts cannibalism via the script. In the newly added
“Author’s Note” in the 2001 edition of the text, which precedes the script, an unnamed author
directs that any time a “/” appears in the script, the meaning is that one actor interrupts/overlaps
another. None of these marks appear in the script. Not unlike Sebastian’s Poem of Summer, the
text asks for something to be found that was never there in the first place. Ian’s simulated
penetration of the dead baby doubles back onto the un-penetrated text; what is “really”
penetrated is not, and what is not “really” penetrated is.
This process of penetration doubling-back in on itself in a consuming fashion, i.e.,
retroperformativity through parenthetical and paratetextual activities, must be enacted in this
study as well in order to more fully examine the ways by which the word on the page performs. .
While David Greig’s “Author’s Note,” which precedes Kane’s script, authorizes Kane as author,
it simultaneously disconnects Kane from the work and paratextually re-members itself with the

19

script. Its addition reconstitutes not only Blasted’s script, but Greig, as author, and Greig’s play
San Diego. Chapter Three’s place, in the middle of the project, serves to enact this kind of
interplay between text and text and body and text again by paratextualizing and parenthesizing
itself. In other words, the official, 2001 edition of Kane’s play must be experienced
paratextually, with the Editor’s note getting the reconstituting, the eating, the focus of the script;
it is in the middle. The reader pays more attention to the asides than to the “main” text. The
script of Kane’s Blasted tears into the Editor’s Note. Her Author’s Note tears into the Editor’s
Note. Cannibalism, in the reading, takes on a new hue in this light.
1

The Editor’s Note, which one may infer is by the playwright David Greig, has the
ability to enact a critical awareness to a point where it can be “gotten through/over”? Sarah
Kane, in an interview she gave to the Independent in 1995, expressed shock; she was taken aback
“by the baby being stoned” in Edward Bond’s Saved. She evokes the passive voice, as if she was
2

3

acted upon by an object indirectly; rather than a subject directly, which ensures the
4

subjectivity of the reader (Kane) by maintaining the objecthood of the text (the script for
Saved), i.e., an entity which indirectly represents, later on, in the future. She was reading the
play, not seeing it right then. The representation occurs on stage, not on the page.

1
2
3

Who knew Kane and who penned the Introduction for the 2001 edition of Kane’s work.
part of the sentence
Ibid.

4

Please note that this application of the term “script” applies to the written words on the
page. This application does not evoke Richard Schechner’s use of the term, “script,” which is
the essence of a text that can be transmitted into new situations. He considers the “theatre” to
be an event, specific to a performer’s activities, and he considers the “performance” to be
“everything” that went into the specific event. See “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance.”
Drama Review 17.3 (Sept. 1973): 9.
20

That indescribable feeling of “having the all-overs,” or the disquiet that accompanies
seeing a performance, echoes through Sarah Kane’s reaction to reading Saved. Sitting in
5

proximity to (not with) others while a representation transacts upon her in a theatre, while she is
6

“alert but still,” is unnerving in the way that reading Saved, in hyper-proximity to oneself (not
7

8

with) others while a rehearsal, i.e., reading the script for a performance-to-be, is unnerving. In
9

both instances, there is a distancing that occurs, either between the “spectator/performance
binary” (Sagnon 124) or the reader/text binary. In the first scenario, there is alienation from
yourself and someone sitting next to you, via the actor on stage. In the second scenario, there is
alienation within yourself, from yourself, as you read, as you must lose yourself in the process of
consuming the work.
The act of the anthropophagai, of the human-eater, undergirds this project. Using the
figure of the script-ual

10

cannibal, to-be-enacted, this project will show that the gap between

representation and the actual expands and contracts; this en-(s)crypting

11

process necessarily

conceals that the difference between the two on stage is a matter of degree, at most. Sebastian’s
cannibalism reveals the en-(s)scripting processes in the theatre, as well as on the page. His

5

Those who are having a communal, collective experience.

6

See Eric W. Sagnon’s “Theater Blows [Coups de theater]” in Dismemberment in
Drama/Dismemberment of Drama (2008). Trans. Craig N. Owens.
7
8
9

Alone with oneself and the text.
Borrowing from Roland Barthes’s use of the term, “rehearsal.” See Image-Music-Text (1977).
Passive Voice.

10

The cannibal in the play’s script. The cannibal as taboo.

11

The play on the terms: “encrypt” (to encode); script (the document used for a play
rehearsal); “scrypt” (key for un/locking encryptions); and, “crypt” (the always-already eternal,
living but dead, status of writing).
21

supposed sacrifice serves as a means to understanding theatre itself to be a cannibalistic
enterprise. The tension between the text on the page and the text on the stage is a self-sustaining,
self-cannibalizing one, each usurping and reconstituting the other.
Chapter Three examines Laura in David Greig’s San Diego, who also wishes to pull the
veil of representation away. She cuts off bits of her flesh to offer to the character David in order
to join with him. Her word, “take ye and eat,” and the act of cutting and frying and giving to
David (who one hears smack, smack, smacking away) enact J. L. Austin’s notion of the “explicit
performative”: The intonated, commandment is the doing, consummated in the hearing of the
smacking. Laura wishes to collapse the distance between herself and David, to transcend self and
other. The saying and the doing connect, through the sound of cannibalism. Laura’s explicit
commands that the character David eat her, consummated in the sound of David’s smacking,
challenges the Austianian notion of the performative. The saying and the doing depend upon the
hearing, which distances the saying from the doing.

12

In order to condense the distance between

actuality and representation, the hearing splits the doing in such a way that it cannot be
perceived. Derrida denotes that “hearing-oneself-speak,”

13

precludes Laura being both speaker

and hearer, both that-to-be-consumed and consumer. She cannot enact transubstantiation
with(out) such a gap on stage.
It is the hearing that challenges the ability to be both subject and object, both eaten and
eater because the “instant” is not really that at all. In other words, to hear, as a speaker, requires

12

The hiatus must exist as the silently speaking to oneself requires one distance herself from
speaker and hearer. In Languages of the Unsayable, Derrida indicates that this process is one of
negation that denies the self (25).
13

Found in Speech and Phenomena, pp. 69-78. Note Derrida is playing off of Husserl’s idea that
lived experience (Erlebnis) has more to do with the interior than the exterior. Derrida wishes to
add exterior “detours” to the process.
22

that one distance oneself from oneself in order to be both. Laura is both, though. Shoshana
Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body examines Don Juan via Austin and suggests that:
speaking bodies . . . commit literary speech acts . . . speech always brings the body—the
unconscious into play . . . from the standpoint of other characters in the play . . . by the
constancy of God himself, by the voice of Heaven—a promise . . . is only the promise of
language to refer, to make sense, to ensure a meaning that will be lasting, constant,
constative [as opposed to performative] . . . to be secluded . . . refuses . . . to be seduced
by language, to believe in the promise of language. (21)
Cannibalism buries this promise in that gap between Laura and David. Cannibalism in theatre,
then, proves to be more than just a metaphor as it also proves that there is more to materiality
than the material. Sebastian not only becomes his own material figure through cannibalism; the
(dis)embodied voice transubstantiates Sebastian. Laura’s voice enacts, and David’s sound
consummates the cannibalism, i.e., the sound reconstitutes Laura au sein la chair de la chair de
David.
Chapter 4 examines how in Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of
Assyria, nothing works for the interloping Emperor, who has manifested, he says, in order to
educate and civilize and give purpose to the beast he labels the Architect. Despite the Emperor’s
best efforts to be someone else, nothing works. Cross-dressing, role-playing, and acts of naming
do not propel the Emperor and the Architect into a transubstantiated relationship. In the last line
of the play, the Emperor commands the Architect to eat him. The Austinian command is
problematized, as the saying gets disconnected from the doing. Only the after-effects present
themselves, as the Architect suckles the last morsels of flesh from the Emperor’s bones, from an
Emperor who reappears in the guise of the Architect, who has just cannibalized the Emperor.

23

This project asks how cannibalism might challenge the Austianian notion of the
performative via cannibalism (paratextual and parenthetical activitities) in order to fulfill
Artaud’s wish for a new kind of theatre. The figure of the cannibal (dis)embodies the theatrical
exchange between inside and outside. Sebastian, in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last
Summer, serves as such an example. He hopes to collapse the distance between his art and
himself, between object and subject, so too does this project attempt to put the theatre of the page
and the stage into simultaneous interplay to such a degree that the difference between the two is
one of degree.

24

Chapter 1
Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer:
(re)Inscribing the Body via Cannibalism
Part I-Cannibalism Off Stage and On the Page
Art is not the imitation of life, but life is the imitation of a transcendental principle which art puts
us into communication with once again.
Antonin Artaud from Complete Works (1970)

MRS. VENABLE. A poet’s life is his work and his work is his life.
(from Suddenly, Last Summer, 12)
In Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), an old-money, New Orleans
family, the Venables, face a crisis that threatens to destroy their good name: What happened to
poor Sebastian last summer? On vacation with his cousin, Catherine, in Spain’s seaside resort
town, Cabeza de Lobo, Sebastian mysteriously dies. When the play opens, Mrs. Venable
contends that there is something not quite right with Catherine’s story. The audience does not yet
know what this is, and it is up to Dr. Cukrowicz,

14

a hard-up psychiatrist in the area who

practices lobotomies at nearby Lion’s View Psychiatric hospital, to discover the truth. By the
end, the good doctor’s drugged patient reveals that Sebastian had been ripped asunder and, in all
probability, partially consumed by teenage boys living on the streets. Catherine asserts that they
looked so hungry; there were “bands of homeless young [boys] that lived on the free beach like
scavenger dogs, hungry children . . . this you won’t believe, nobody has believed it, nobody
could believe it, and I don’t blame them!—They had devoured parts of him” (81, 92).
Catherine’s stories about Sebastian threaten his legacy.
For Sebastian’s mother, Mrs. Venable, the representation of him as a posthumous poetgod in the play is what matters; and, the stories her niece, Catherine, has been telling threaten

14

Pronounced su-kre-itz, the Polish word for “sugar” or “sugarman.”
25

that. Catherine claims street urchins “devoured parts of him.” For this reason, Catherine must be
made to stop telling. If she does not, she will be declared insane. Mrs. Venable has a doctor
consider the possibility of giving her a lobotomy. The problem is not that Catherine does or does
not tell the truth; her babbling about Sebastian’s cannibalism reveals the nature of the theatre
itself to be cannibalistic.
Piece by piece, Catherine puts Sebastian back together again; she re-members him. He
becomes more present in the play than the other characters, and in this way, he is more material
in his absence than any of them. At the end of the play Catherine’s talking moves beyond the
earlier lyrical symbolism Mrs. Venable uses; Catherine’s talking transforms, transubstantiates
Sebastian. The material is no more or less real than something that is represented. Thus, we
cannibalize Sebastian, after the play is over, by participating in the re-membering ourselves.
Catherine spends a great deal of time on the minute details of their vacation. The more specific
the event, the more abstract the language to enact it. Sebastian becomes an abstraction, for
example, when Catherine moves from the materiality of his suit to his ephemeral, always-present
spirit that has been merged with the landscape, which includes the boys who ate him, the town
where the boys ate him, Mrs. Venable’s salon, and the location of the text, either on stage or on
the page:
[I]t was one of those white blazing days in Cabeza de Lobo, not a blazing hot
blueone but a blazing hot white one . . . Sebastian was as white as the weather. He
had on a spotless white silk Shantung suit and a white silk tie and a white panama
and white shoes, white—white lizard skin-pumps! He . . . kept touching his face
and his throat . . . with a white silk handkerchief and popping little white pills in
his mouth . . .
(During the monologue the lights have changed, the surrounding area has
dimmed out and a hot white spot is focused on Catherine.)

26

He is a white hot blur. Despite the details of his handkerchief or his lizard skin-pumps or his
panama hat, the overriding image is that of whiteness. Thus, all that one is able to focus upon is
the words. What is seen is not what is seen. These words call Sebastian forth and transform him
into a poet-god, whose worshippers include the street urchins, everyone in the play, and the
consumers of the play. Pieces of Sebastian get reconstituted in this act of worship. Street urchins
are no longer street urchins; they are “featherless little black sparrows” who are also part of
Sebastian. The outside is now inside. Noises and music even eat:
It was all white outside. White hot, a blazing white hot, hot blazing
white . . . It looked as if . . . a huge white bone had caught on fire in the
sky and blazed so bright it was white and turned the sky an everything under the
sky white with it! . . . [F]eatherless little black sparrows . . . Torn or cut parts of
him away with their . . . jagged tin cans they made [oompa-oompa] music
with . . . [the—following band . . .] had torn bits of him away and stuffed them
into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs. There wasn’t a
sound any more, there was nothing to be seen of Sebastian, what was left of him,
that looked like a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses had been torn,
thrown, crushed!—against that blazing white wall . . . (89, 92)
The play forces a shift from inside to outside (Catherine’s talking), from outside to inside
(Sebastian inside of those urchins). The play reveals the nothing that is always-already
represented in theatre is something that eats itself.
How do intimations of cannibalism in theatre serve to apprehend the essence of theatre as
cannibalism? In “The Disembodied Voice,” Judith Roof notes how voices off stage “guarantee[]
the self-contradictory status of the theatre as that which both is and never was. The disembodied
voice on stage is an interloper that assures us that the nothing there . . . has never been there and
never will be . . .” (23). Sebastian, too, is both and never was. His re-membering on stage is a
performance in itself. At the heart of that performance is Catherine’s disembodied voice; she is
outside of herself as she goes over her story, which has clearly been rehearsed before, and is

27

being performed, yet again, one more time. The voice that is doing the speaking is in question.
Just because she seems to be talking, some other force within must be at the helm.
If she is not taking drugs to give her these cannibalistic illusions, then perhaps she should
be taking something. Thus, the Doctor gives her a little assistance to get the truth out, even if the
help has nothing to do with her state of mind. Eventually, she is under the influence of a
powerful medication, which possibly influences her behavior. She claims that she has “to wait
now and then till it gets clearer. Under the drug it has to be a vision, or nothing comes . . .” (85).
The vision of Sebastian’s cannibalism is anything but visible. As we hear Sebastian’s coming
together and out of her, the doctor attempts to stop it. He hopes to force the truth out of her,
which cannot possibly be that Sebastian was eaten alive. “I’ll have to tell Aunt Violet what
happened” (44), Catherine explains to her mother and brother, regardless of how her story
threatens Mrs. Holly’s and George’s hopes to cash in on Sebastian’s will, “To each of us, fifty
grand, each!—AFTER! TAXES!—GET IT?” (George, 45). In a way, Mrs. Holly and George
cash in on cannibalism as well; through Catherine’s hopeful adjustments to her tale, they might
be able to nibble on Mrs. Venable. Cannibalism, though, precludes the dispensation of their
money, as Catherine’s story consumes Mrs. Venable’s.
As an interloper, that disembodied, drugged voice evokes Sebastian in both a holistic and
holy way. We receive the whole story, complete with holes in him. He is holy because
cannibalism has made him so. The process of the penetration of his flesh, its consumption,
reconstitution, and undoing and then Catherine’s redoing of that process via telling, supplies the
missing pieces of the original text of her story. The talking is supposed to cure her of her
delusional fantasy that Sebastian was eaten alive. Instead, as she narrates cannibalism, the play
ends with the doctor’s proclamation that her story might be true, rather than building toward

28

climax and revelation. The possibility still remains that she might be lobotomized, unless the
talking stops.
The telling materializes Sebastian (or at least a version of Sebastian) on stage, which
reveals “the presence of something that stands for something that was never there” (Roof 23).
The “nothing” that was never there in the first place is the art/ist it/himself. Catherine’s telling
constitutes an interference that re-presents what was never there while becoming itself the focus
of the play. Catherine’s is an embodied voice that disassociates itself from its source. Her voice
itself becomes a self-cannibalizing material figure in the play. As her recounting of the
cannibalistic scene violates, penetrates, and represents Sebastian, each time the scene is retold,
he is told, the scene—and Sebastian himself—are interrupted. Dr. Cuckoricz interrupts
Catherine. Mrs. Venable interrupts Catherine. Catherine’s mother and brother interrupt her.
Catherine interrupts Catherine. After each interruption of Catherine’s representation, Sebastian
rematerializes. The telling resumes. Each time, the violence Catherine does to him via her
representation of his cannibalization tears him apart to be consumed, only to be reconstituted to
start all over again.
As that which must be repeatedly recommenced, Sebastian, who desired “to live his art,”
as Mrs. Venable exclaims, wished to be his own art. Becoming art will make him godlike,
capable of living forever, in the (telling of the) writing (that always/never exists/ed). The writing
becomes the Sebastian who has been consumed. The writing becomes him; he becomes the
writing. His Poem of Summer, though, is blank. There are no composed lines of poetry. The
pages are blank. That Sebastian conflates himself with his work not only mirrors what happened
to him, it also re-enacts what happened to him. Catherine’s babbling about Sebastian’s

29

cannibalization transubstantiates Sebastian so that he might be repeatedly re-cannibalized.
Sebastian’s art, then, must itself be absent; to be his art, Sebastian must be consumed.
Thus, the absence of signifiers within this work parallel the absence of his body’s signification,
creating a new Sign that reveals the identity of form and content as well as the insight that form
and content are inherently interchangeable. Like an Ourobouros, they eat one another.
In the first scene of the play, Mrs. Venable has brought the doctor in with the expectation
that he perform the lobotomizing procedure on Catherine, regardless of whether or not her story
is true. Catherine’s mode of revealing Sebastian’s absent writing unmoors Mrs. Venable’s plans
to secure her own and Sebastian’s legacies as their bodies and souls conjoin. . Catherine’s telling
undermines Mrs. Venable’s plans to achieve transubstantiation herself by joining with Sebastian
as the trasnsubstantiated artist. Mrs. Venable produces a ritualized, rehearsed and mythologizing
tale to convince the Doctor of her comm-union with Sebastian, as she informs the Doctor that
when they are on vacation, “We were a famous couple. People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his
mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said ‘Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian are
staying at the Ritz in Madrid. Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian have taken a house at
Biarritz for the season” (25). Her attempts to convince the doctor of their unity are not
succeeding.
Dr. Cukrowicz informs Mrs. Venable that even though performing lobotomies “pacifies”
(30) the patients, which makes him “[feel] proud” (19), “[t]here is a great deal of risk in my
operation . . . the person will always be limited afterwards . . . I can’t guarantee that a lobotomy
would stop her—babbling!! (29, 30). Mrs. Venable calmly replies, “That may be, maybe not, but
after the operation, who would believe her, Doctor?” (30) just as long as people believe she is
insane, Sebastian’s death, in all its inevitability, can be redefined, traversed, and transcended,

30

Catherine’s insane talking re-codifies death through the p/stage. Cannibalism re-codifies death
from something that can be verified by the body to something that shows the body’s potential in
its reconstitution.
In The Theatre and Its Double Antonin Artaud suggests that by de-emphasizing dialogue,
life and art in the theatre might meld. In his analysis of Artaud’s theories regarding the theatre,
Derrida comments that :
Artaud is the embodiment of both an aggressive and repairing gesture . . .
identifying life with art . . . . Theatricality must traverse and restore “existence”
and “flesh” . . . Thus, whatever can be said of the body can be said of the theatre.
Rebirth . . . occurs through a kind of reduction of organs. But this redemption
permits the access to a life before birth and after death ( . . . through dying/I have
finally achieved real immortality,” p. 110), and not to a death before birth and
after life. (WD, “Theatre of Cruelty: The Closure of Representation,” 232)
Cannibalism is a ritualistic version of the reduction of organs that enables rebirth and
redemption. The trope of cannibalism in Williams’ play is an aggressive and repairing gesture,
and as such the evocation of cannibalism raises questions about how art transforms the human
body in theatre in so far as Artaud urges, “Whatever can be said of the body can be said of the
theatre.” If art is the means by which Sebastian can create a life before death and restore the flesh
and existence to a state of redemption, what happens when the art is the body that homeless boys
ate? Is it in that eating that the art is finally made? Is the art produced and enacted in Catherine’s
recounting of the scene? Where does the self-perpetuating cannibalism of Sebastian end? The
transubstantiation of the art from medium to medium ,(i.e., Catherine’s retelling), reduces
organs, enables rebirth, enables redemption.

31

After her injection, Catherine in her recounting begins to talk of her and Sebastian’s trip
together. The interruptions are significant:
CATHERINE. . . . [S]uddenly, last summer . . .
DOCTOR. Go on.
CATHERINE. The Blue Jay Notebook!
......................
MRS. VENABLE. I know what she means . . . Sebastian used [it] for . . . his
“Poem of Summer.” It went with him everywhere . . . in his jacket
pocket, even his dinner jacket.
.....................
DOCTOR. I don’t quite get the connection between . . . clothes . . . and the
Blue Jay notebook.
MRS. VENABLE. I HAVE IT! . . .
DOCTOR. With all these interruptions it’s going to be awfully hard
to— (74, 75)
With the loss of the organs, the transformation of the human body is not just a reduction, but a
reduction through cannibalization—through the (dis)embodying process of Catherine’s telling
itself. The retelling reduces the body to the writing, George’s clothes no longer serve as
Sebastian’s metaphor because Sebastian himself is being transubstantiated. To stop this process
(perhaps to reserve it for herself), Mrs. Venable attempts to project Sebastian onto others by
providing her own ritualistic speeches, Christian allegories, and Darwinian theories of evolution
to Dr. Sugar, her new sounding-board. Metonymic objects, such as his old clothes, can no longer
be correlated with Sebastian. Mrs. Venable chastises George, “I see that he had the natural tact
and good taste to come here this afternoon outfitted from head to foot in clothes that belonged to
my son!” (51) The reminder only distances her from, rather than bringing her closer to Sebastian

32

15

because of the remainders (“what was left of him”)

that are left over after Catherine’s telling.

Catherine is able to recombine the detached “organ” of the notebook with Sebastian’s organs,
and rather than stopping her, Mrs. Venable assists with the reconstitution, that is, Sebastian’s
cannibalization, with her interruptions. In her last line in the play, Mrs. Venable gasps, “Lion’s
View! State Asylum, cut this hideous story out of her brain!” (93). Even in her material
intervention, not only with the babbling potentially not stopping, but the babbling will, outside of
Catherine’s own words, even after her words have ceased being heard, continually cannibalize
and transubstantiate Sebastian.
Catherine tears the inner and outer organs, i.e., his poems that serve as signposts for
Sebastian, inside-out. Mrs. Venable claims that she and Sebastian “had an agreement between
[them], a sort of . . . covenant between us . . . I’d reach across a table and touch his hands and say
not a word, just look . . . until his hands stopped shaking and his eyes looked out, not in, and in
the morning, the poem would be continued” (76). Catherine changes this arrangement or holy
contract between Mrs. Venable and Sebastian; she cuts “that string of pearls that old mothers
hold their sons by like a—sort of a—sort of—umbilical cord” (77). Curiously, Catherine evokes
the material, anatomical umbilical cord as a metaphor to describe Mrs. Venable’s hold on
Sebastian. The poem is the link between Sebastian and Mrs. Venable; yet, the pages upon which
the poem exists are blank, as Catherine’s telling threatens to expose, which, ironically enough,
Mrs. Venable exposes herself. Mrs. Venable protests, “. . . I want you to see [the Blue Jay
notebook]. Here it is, here! [She holds up a notebook and leafs swiftly through the pages.] Title?
“Poem of Summer,” . . . After that: what? Blank pages, blank pages, nothing but nothing!” (75).

15

Catherine, 92.
33

Catherine makes Mrs. Venable the interloper, an umbilical cord that remains after the birth,
connecting nothing to nothing else. The poem, however, continues because Sebastian’s absent
rhetorical signifiers look in, not out. Or, they are inside, rather than outside. The reduction and
redemption of the lines of poetry, his organs, can be understood as re-membering something that
never existed in the first place: his work of art/him as poet, which is constantly dismembering the
re-membering that Catherine is doing through her talking. He exists more in his absence.
Catherine is clearly aware she is being watched in his absence; she has been through
interrogations before. It is a performance that she consciously and conscientiously attempts to
effect. After the Doctor give her a shot she does not feel dizzy, she performs her dizziness:
DOCTOR. Stand up.
[She holds him tight against her.]
CATHERINE. How funny! Now I can! Oh, I do feel dizzy! Help me, I’m[He rushes to support her.]
-about to fall over . . . .
[He holds her. She looks out vaguely toward the brilliant, steaming garden. Looks
back at him. Suddenly sways toward him, against him.]
DOCTOR. You see, you lost your balance.
CATHERINE. No I didn’t. I did what I wanted to do without you telling me to.
(70-71)
This layer of her performance gives the Doctor his cues. He needs it in order to continue on with
his dissection of her brain, first, psychoanalytically, and second, surgically. Her telling in the end
precludes any of the instructions, what Catherine calls a command, i.e., to be told, he gives her.
His telling interrupts her performance which allows for the transubstantiating telling that reflects

34

on Sebastian’s cannibalization while the talking itself gets cannibalized. The talking is a scalpel,
more blunt and more effective than any knife the Doctor might use.
Thus, each time Catherine is interrupted, the re-memberment of Sebastian occurs. Organs
get reduced and redeemed, and in an allegorical sense, once the Doctor takes a bite of
Catherine’s talking, once he bites, once he starts to believe her performance is a result of drugs
or trauma, he believes he can cure her; he believes he can solve these hysterical symptoms. The
further he pushes, cutting into her telling, the more he enables her telling to effect an alwaysalready cannibalized Sebastian. The Doctorcannibalizes Sebastian too, and, Catherine’s
interruptions destroy earlier manifestations of Sebastian/Poem of Summer. Even though Mrs.
Venable does not know it, she assists in the cannibalization, “Blank pages, blank pages, nothing
but nothing” (75). Interruptions destroy the old Sebastian in lieu of the new. Mrs. Venable’s fear
is that the new, cannibalized Sebastian signifies nothing at all. Or, at least the wrong something.
Roof indicates, theatre reveals that there was “nothing” there to begin with; this nothing
is an act produced in and by interrupting the consumption of the telling, of the eating of
Sebastian. The constant need to reinvoke the nothing, and reinitiate the cannibalism enacts the
conflation of both absent body and absent art as they continually become present. The pages are
blank; the present absence of there being any writing in the text emphasizes Catherine’s telling
and re-membering of Sebastian. The Doctor loses his patience with all of the interruptions, but
not his own.
The Doctor, too, interrupts . . . the interruptions: “What’s that got to do with— ” (75);
“These interruptions—” (76); “Please!” (77); “You musn’t interrupt her” (79) Either he is a lousy
doctor, or he has no real intention of stopping Mrs. Venable’s repeated asides, which attempt to
complete Catherine’s babbling. When the Doctor asks what the blank pages have to do with

35

Sebastian’s clothes, and further, with anything at all, Mrs. Venable responds it has everything to
do with “[h]is destruction”(75) because a “poet’s vocation is something that rests on something
as thin and fine as the web of a spider, Doctor. That’s all that holds him over!—out of
destruction. . . . Few, very few are able to do it alone! Great help is needed! I did give it! She
didn’t” (76). Each time Mrs. Venable interrupts Catherine, a ritualized, repetitive incantation
occurs. Catherine begins to repeat the phrase, “Suddenly, Last Summer” (a total of four times
during the climax of the interrogation), over and over again. Each time signals her having been
reset by the interruptions, and each interruption tears into Sebastian’s art, his flesh, and with each
repetition, the form of Sebastian morphs and transforms. Even the Doctor cannot help himself to
a little nibble:
CATHERINE. [quoting Sebastian] [H]e said: “Don’t look at those little monsters.
Beggars are a social disease in this country. If you look at them,
you get sick of the country, it spoils the whole country for you . . .”
DOCTOR. Go on.
CATHERINE. I’m going on . . .
(84)
The difference between the telling of what happened and whatever representations of Sebastian
manifested beforehand overlap, are interrupted, and are persistently consumed.
As the Doctor and Mrs. Venable continue interrupting, the dialogue becomes
cacophonous, not unlike the jungle noises which proliferate in the play. The stage directions
indicate that the interrogation shall be done with so much rapidity that interrupting turns into
overlapping: “(The following ten speeches are said very rapidly, overlapping)” (76). This effect
recurs in moments in which Sebastian explicitly serves as a wafer--as the sacrificial body that
will seal communion and community, as, for example, when Catherine begins to get to the end of
her telling:
36

CATHERINE. The, the the!—band of children began to—serenade us . . . .
DOCTOR. Do what?
CATHERINE. Play for us! On instruments! Make music!—if you could call it
music . . .
.........................................
. . . they would come darting up to the barbed wire fence as if
blown there by the wind, the hot white wind from the sea, all
crying out, “Pan, pan, pan!”
DOCTOR. What’s pan?
CATHERINE. The word for bread, and they made gobbling noises with their little
black mouths, stuffing their little black fists to their mouths and making
those gobbling noises, with frightful grins!
(85, 84)
The word for bread is “Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian!” The telling begins to shift out of
representation to become an evocation of transubstantiation, “Gobble, Gobble,” but thanks to the
Doctor’s interruption, Catherine does not evoke something that cannot be represented. The
Doctor’s interruption does that for her, the interruption performing the presence that recounting
can only imply Making sure to emphasize the act of representation via the most obvious of
unmasking agents: translation, the Doctor hopes to assure himself that what she means is what
happened: What the beggars said, how they behaved; what the color of their lips were. What
does “pan” mean?
There is safety in surgery as much as there is “safe surgery” (per the Doctor’s
assurances). THE definitive answer lies in the body, that is simply real; it is not a representing
agent, per se. And yet Sebastian’s absent body re-presents the entire saga of life/death/rebirth.
Catherine insists her telling is a story of the times. She means the story is a metaphor or is
indicative of the times: We eat each other. However, the act of speaking, also, is an e/inaction

37

for our times as well. Catherine makes this cannibalistic claim in order to avoid the material fate
of her cousin, being reconstituted inside a bunch of teenage boys. This is why she repeatedly
uses biological metaphors to make her claim about the existential dilemma embodied (but really
dis-embodied) that is Sebastian; she cannot deal with what “really” happened unless she gives as
many details as she possibly can about his body being torn apart and eaten. It is the
metaphysical, not the physical, that she fears. She exclaims, for example, “Yes! Yes, something
had broken, that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a—sort of a—sort of—
umbilical cord, long—after . . .” (77). The emphasis on the biology is to bring forth a more
“significant” (other than) meaning for Sebastian, which must come hurriedly, before he meets his
fate all over again. “Access to a life before birth and after death . . . and not to a death before
birth and after life” (Derrida) occurs cannibalistically in so far as cannibalism joins the physical
with the symbolic.
Sebastian is redeemed from theology, only to enact his own kind of redemption. What he
redeems is the theatre itself. Derrida claims that through Artaud, we might do away with the
theological servitude of the stage:
The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to
speech. (235)
Cannibalism’s ability to combine the symbolic and the physical thwarts the will to speak, thwarts
the reader’s will to speak, the title of this project “out loud,” for example. Catherine’s will to
speak is enabled; it is able to manifest, to transubstantiate body and existence from the past to the
present, from physical being to story, from attempt to art, from being to memory. These
manifestations and the will to transcend through transformation is exactly what Mrs. Venable is
after: to join with the art that is Sebastian and vice versa. She desires a kind of immortality, for
both her and her son. The threat of death is alleviated through the imaginary joinder of
38

anthropophagy. Ironically, then, the matriarch’s attempts to stem the threat of permanent and
meaningless death provides the means for Sebastian’s life before death. Stopping the
dissemination of Catherine’s “babbling” might just save the mythical status of Sebastian
Venable, the artist, who wanted to live his art, to be his art. Mrs. Venable’s insistence that “[a]
poet’s life is his work and his work is his life” (12) manifests in Catherine’s talking, not hers.
Mrs. Venable delays the potential of the transubstantiated, sacrificed Sebastian to exist.
Eventually, Catherine’s performance--her interrupted babbling--wins out by exciting the
processes of signification to such a degree that, as the good Doctor exclaims at the end of the
play, “I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be
true . . .” (93). The truth is in the telling; the truth is that theatre is a cannibal; in eating what was
never there it produces what Artaud may have been after in his Theatre of Cruelty, which can be
seen as an artistic expression that is as far away from representation as it can be, or at least, uses
different kinds of representation in performances that are not speaking. Perhaps we might join
with the art too.
Despite whatever assurances Mrs. Holly, Catherine’s mother, gives that “nobody,
absolutely nobody in the city, knows a thing about what you [Catherine] been through. Have
they George? Not a thing. Not a soul even knows that you’ve come back from Europe” (60), she
cannot face the truth that meaning consumes—eats—itself. Get her to stop that yaking, or we
will have to cut out her brain. Ironically, Mrs. Venable’s intervention with Dr. Sugar’s safer
surgery puts an end to the psycho-babble, offering the material scalpel to the material brain, for
in theoretical terms, psychoanalysis (an interrogation as intervention) should preclude the
16

lobotomy (an intervention as the Final Interrogation, “when the treatments fail” ), and, most

16

Mrs. Venable, Suddenly, Last Summer, p. 55.
39

certainly, the lobotomy precludes any idealistic hopes of getting to the bottom of things: Where
is Sebastian? (Psst…he’s in/outside you).
Once the Doctor invades Catherine’s material body, in theory, the talking, the
representing will dissipate. The material is the final point of intervention. Despite Catherine’s
insistence throughout the play, “I still think I’m sane!” (62), everyone else never speaks directly
about the issue of her sanity. The Doctor, for example, responds to her claim, “You think [Mrs.
Venable] . . . had a stroke?” (62). Her mother, Mrs. Holly, suggests that Catherine think about
the real truth to her story, which is not the “fantastic story” (Mrs. Holly, 44) she (Catherine) has
been telling, which reveals that there is not a difference between the material and the
representation. The Doctor believes that psychoanalysis, practiced as a talking to/through
trauma, may not take care of the problem. Attack the body instead. His continual doubt in his
own abilities reveals in this moment his (perhaps every character’s) need to construct and
maintain the actual/representational binary by relying more heavily on the sureties of the body
instead of the methodologies of psychoanalysis. In the excesses of the body’s cannibalization,
the revelation and ultimate redemption is that there is no body.

17

What is in a body? What

embodies the body, exactly? And, how does that relate to a new kind of cannibalistic theatre?
Derrida claims that Artaud embodies violence and the means to repair that violence.
Sebastian (dis)embodies violence and the means to reconstitute that violence. The violence off
stage gets reconstituted via Sebastian’s cannibalization. Through his having been cannibalized,
through his continuously being cannibalized through the telling, and then, through the body that
is the play’s telling of Catherine’s telling, under duress, is an encrypting process that eats itself,
(un)raveling as it is being told. No one can read anyone else. Their bodies are unreadable,

17

-“Who hurts you?” -“Nobody.”
40

unspeakable in the cannibalistic chaos that is the interrogation. Their bodies are so unreadable,
unspeakable that the Doctor insists she continue her tale so that they all might be marked and
washed anew in the blood of the sacrificial lamb, Sebastian. Doctor Sugar administers the
solution: Give her an injection.
The Doctor hopes to tease the god-poet forth and out, but he is not confident. Catherine’s
talking, though, does this very thing. Through Sebastian’s re-membering, she exposes the
seams/seems of theatre. Sebastian’s persistently transubstantiated body/art redeems the play and
the theatre itself from conventional, ritual, material routines associated with the stage; the
mythical figure of Sebastian brings the material and the abstract together in a transubstantiated
moment. Neither the material surgery, nor the abstract, talking cure, brings Sebastian forth.
Neither the Doctor’s cold, clinical tonality (emphasis on the real, the material) at the end of the
play, nor Mrs. Venable’s magical incantations at the beginning (emphasis on the ephemeral, the
mythical) prove successful. However, the structure of the play, bracketed on either end with the
magical and the material, with Catherine-Sebastian/art in the middle, enacts a condensation
towards the middle that makes Sebastian’s image and aura present and palpable, present
temporality in talking repetitively about him. Stories about cannibalism become a cannibalism
of the stories as the stuff of the stage; this stuff is the art of a consistent deferral of art as art
itself. Catherine explains that she “tried to save [Sebastian from] . . . Completing—a sort of!—
image!—he had of himself as a sort of!—sacrifice to a!—terrible sort of a—”; “—God?” the
Doctor asks (64). His sacrifice is made possible through this moment.
His absence, then, is presence for her. Likewise, even for Mrs. Venable, her focus on the
various elements of the garden, like the Venus fly trap, become a metaphor for Sebastian, as a
predator, as a meticulous man, as a man terrified of not having a resonance or meaning outside of

41

himself. To be living art, even before/after death, the outside must be made inside for Sebastian.
And, vice versa. Representation can be eschewed only if it is excited and proliferated. When this
occurs, transubstantiation can occur: the image becomes the act; representation becomes
performance; performance becomes performative.
Catherine feels the additional burden of her mother and brother pressuring her to change
whatever tale she has relayed before the play begins, as they stand to lose whatever inheritance
Mrs. Venable might decide to bestow upon them, which, does not seem too promising anyway,
as Catherine’s brother decides to appear in Sebastian’s old clothes the day this all takes place, a
clear embodiment of their tackiness, a false embodiment of Sebastian’s legacy for Mrs. Venable,
yet another threat, another reincarnation. Everyone represents Sebastian, projecting him onto
items, people, and even states of age and sexuality. Sebastian’s ghost gives Mrs. Venable a
lover’s mark, rather than a mother’s. Sebastian’s ghost can give Catherine relief from his being
eaten alive. Perhaps he might let her know it was part of his plan, and thus, she is expunged from
any guilt and subsequent horror that she is feeling.
This specter of Sebastian does not give either character what she is after, however. Mrs.
Venable’s lyrical speaking about Venus fly traps and baby turtles being devoured by birds while
she and Sebastian are on a trip to Dr. Sugar is an attempt to project Sebastian onto Sugar. He
becomes a sugar-substitute for the godlike Sebastian, but his mother is unable to recapture his
essence, even by recalling what her son saw on an earlier summer trip, i.e., birds eating poor
helpless baby turtles which allowed him to see God. Mrs. Venable recollects:
[Sebastian] was looking for God . . . He spent that whole blazing equatorial
day in the crow’s-nest of the schooner watching this thing on the beach till it
was too dark to see it, and when he came down the rigging he said “Well, now
I’ve seen Him!,” and he meant God. (19)

42

Whatever Sebastian’s essence is, it is doomed to repeated evocation and cannibalization. It
cannot be surmised because it is constantly in the process of being reconstituted. Mrs. Venable
indicates that for Sebastien seeing the frenzied consumption of the hundreds of baby sea turtles
by birds on the beach in the Encantadas was like “seeing God”: These parallel consumptions call
attention to the ritual character of the play itself.

18

Sugar serves as Sebastian’s substitute for both Catherine (she exclaims they look alike
and then kisses the Doctor) and Mrs. Venable (she suggests the Doctor reminds her of him).
Projecting Sebastian onto Sugar is an art project of sorts and parallels Sebastian’s own activities,
as he sublimated his activities into “art” and his art into life. This process of sublimation
becomes self-conscious during Sugar’s interrogation of Catherine. As he allows Mrs. Venable to
take him for her son, he also allows Catherine to see him in a similar light. She obliges him.
Presumably, he does this in order to get to the truth about Sebatsian. Although rupturing the
delusions of the delusional may also be a form of cannibalism, in this play such activity becomes
an antidote to the delusion of cannibalism itself. The talking cure must be administered
painstakingly, meticulously, ritualistically. Thus, Catherine, too, transfers Sebastian onto Sugar,

18

This meta-textuality not only evokes the sexual repression and perversion that underlies the
play, but its own legacy to other acts of cannibalism Scholars such as Janice Segal suggest that
Euripides’ The Bacchae and Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer have as much to do with the
object of Sebastian or Pentheus (or not) as with the subject of their memories and legacies. She
purports, “Suddenly Last Summer resonates strongly with many of the themes and plot details
of Euripides' Bacchae. Much of the action in both plays turns on the consequences of a perverse
sexuality born of repression (manifested among other ways as a disturbing sexual connection
between mother and son). Other shared themes include the son's search for a god he sees as a
Destroyer, the irresistible pull of eros, the consequences of the psychological fragmentation of
an individual, the struggle between those who seek to reveal truth and those who are
determined to conceal it, and the participation of a mother in the destruction of her own child”
(538).
43

and this transference enables Sugar to discover the details of Catherine’s story, i.e., of
Sebastian’s life before birth, his reconstitution, his redemption.
The ritual of the talking cure and its transferences produces a tension between the
ostensible historical facts of the event and their likelihood or perhaps even impossibility. The
question is not whether or not the cannibalism actually happened, but how stories become
credible. This tension between belief in one kind of representation (Sebastian is a gentleman, a
poet, a heterosexual) over another (Sebastian is a pimp, a work of art, a homosexual) is resolved
by the transubstantiation of Sebastian—by his turning from memory into myth into the ritual of
that myth’s perpetual retelling.
Mrs. Venable’s hope to produce a myth that allows her to achieve immortality cannot
succeed because she cannot stop the dis/re-memberment of Sebastian coming out of Catherine’s
mouth, coming out of Sebastian’s mouth (she quotes him repeatedly). Mrs. Venable exclaims,
“Most people’s lives—what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris,
long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death” (26), but not his life,
and not her life, not their life. However, even Mrs. Venable cannot escape the debris of her own
life, as it is piled up upon her in the wake of Catherine’s talking.
The tour Mrs. Venable gives the Doctor of Sebastian’s garden in her Garden District
home is the beginning of her attempt to transcend this debris of her own life that has been piling
up. She sets the garden as the stage by which her own talking to the Doctor will allow her to
conjoin with her son. This attempt fails, and it reveals that one of Sebastian’s foremost
preoccupations with the Venus flytrap within his garden was a first step. The flytrap foreshadows
the act of cannibalization, after-the-fact. Opening the play, she states:
Yes, this was Sebastian’s garden. The Latin names of the plant were printed on
tags attached to them but the print’s fading out . . . some of the rarest plants, such
44

as the Venus flytrap—you know what this is Doctor? The Venus flytrap? . . . [I]t
feeds on insects. It has to be kept under glass from early fall to late spring . . .
DOCTOR: It’s like a well-groomed jungle . . .
MRS. VENABLE: That’s how he meant it to be, nothing was accidental, everything
was planned and designed in Sebastian’s life and his—work! . . . his life was
his occupation.
DOCTOR. I see.
MRS. VENABLE. No, you don’t see, yet, before I’m through, you will.—Sebastian was
a poet! That’s what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of
a poet is the life of a poet—and vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of
a poet . . .
.......................
I won’t collapse! She’ll collapse! I mean her lies will collapse—not my truth—not
the truth . . . . Forward march, Doctor Sugar!
(10, 11, 12)
“The well-groomed jungle” is probably the Doctor’s reluctant recognition of Mrs. Venable’s
speech. Thus, the connection between Venus flytraps and grooming seems to be the care
Sebastian gave to the garden, i.e., the glass coverings. Sebastian’s care, however, is to keeping
the Venus flytraps fed. One gets the strange feeling Sebastian wished to be consumed like those
flies he fed, for it is not the natural unfolding of nature (the attention God gives to His works),
such as the birds eating baby turtles at the Encantadas, wherein Sebastian sees God. It is the
savage nature of being consumed that appeals to him. He sees God in being reconstituted.
So, Sebastian’s occupation is his life, and his life is his art, and his art is his body, and his
body is cannibalized. Mrs. Venable wants to keep its potential under wraps, under that glass jar,
but the Venus flytrap is dying, just as her representation of him as an orderly and controlling
being fades in the face of his new mythologizing. This new representation must be understood
not just as mythmaking but also as a sacrifice—a ritual.

45

The cannibalism becomes figurative in the operation of theatre. In the theatre, the speech
becomes an intangible presence, a presence felt in the conflation of the art and the poet
Catherine’s speaking produces. Mrs. Venable announces her hope to join with her son in
immortality, through this same conflation, but Catherine’s reconstituting of him does not allow
her to join with him. Transubstantiation occurs without her. Mrs. Venable reveals her fear of
being left behind by continually, ritualistically quoting her son:
‘Violet? Mother? You’re going to live longer than me, and then, when I’m gone,
it will be yours, in your hands, to do whatever you please with!’”—Meaning, of
course, his future recognition!—That he did want, he wanted it after his death
when it couldn’t disturb him; then he did want to offer his work to the world. All
right. Have I made my point, Doctor? Well, here is my son’s work, Doctor, here’s
his life going on!
DOCTOR: [reading the title] Poem of Summer?
(13)
Mrs. Venable reveals to the Doctor that her Sebastian must be sacrificed in order to exist
eternally, and, she reveals that the Doctor must participate, serving as witness to prove her
transubstantiation occurs, both for others and for herself. In Scene One, she repeatedly attempts
to get the Doctor to serve in this capacity, but once Catherine starts her talking, her interruptions
only enhance Sebastian’s sacrifice via Catherine.
Sebastian’s book of poems is like bread substituting for Christ’s body, via the poems,
Mrs. Venable and Sebastian are one, “The role of the benefactor,” she states, “is worse than
thankless, it’s the role of a victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on
the altar steps of their outraged outrageous egos!” (27). By acting as Sebastian’s benefactor,
Mrs. Venable, too, is cannibalized, her blood offered as sacrifice. This figurative blood becomes
real blood in Sebastian’s trasnsubstantiation, which cycles from history to memory to myth to
ritual repeatedly. His book of poetry book is not just an extension of his body; it is his body and

46

vice versa, which would mean that she, too, must be cannibalized. She cannot sacrifice her own
ego on her son’s auto-cannibalizing altar of form and content, of body and existence. It would be
her blood at the foot of the cross. Mrs. Venable states, “My son, Sebastian,” a work(ing) of art,
“and I constructed our days . . . we would—carve out each day of our lives like a piece of
sculpture.—Yes, we left behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture!” (26) Her debris
will be cleansed and washed in the metaphorical blood of Se-bastian, her bastion of hope, of
redemption, of immortality.
Part II-The Artist, God, and the Material
The connection the play makes between the artist, the artist eaten, the narrative of the
artist’s being eaten, and art is that there is more to the materiality of art than its object-ness. As
the art becomes the artist who becomes the artwork becomes the audience receiving that art, the
art becomes artist; the artist becomes the art; and, both become the play itself. Interrupting Mrs.
Venable’s apparent ritualistic recall of her son’s witnessing of birds devouring newborn baby
turtles in the Encantadas, the Doctor asks and then answers his own question, unable to believe:
Did he mean we must rise above God?”
...............................
I can see how he might be, I think he would be disturbed if he thought he’d seen
God’s image, an equation of God, in that spectacle you watched in the Encantadas
. . . to escape that massacre you witnessed, yes, I can see how such a spectacle
could be equated with a good deal of—experience, existence!—but not with God!
Can you?
(19)
Yes, she does, and she does so via her sublimation of Sebastian onto the Doctor. The Doctor has
become Sebastian for Mrs. Venable. This is how the work of art works.
Sebastian becomes God by becoming the work of art, both in terms of his body as art,
and the body/art as the word as the body re-presented/membered and then
47

un-presented/dismembered again through Catherine’s babbling.Catherine’s talking, her words,
do not “vent the inmost [of her] heart[]” (6). They obfuscate and defer to the past that breaks
apart, and re/un-defines the present, both in the way she represents it and in what she represents.
The present is the past, and the theatre becomes a perpetual retroactive re-performance.
That re-performance of the re-membering of Sebastian has temporal consequences as
well as performative ones. Catherine’s ability to talk Sebastian into (dis)embodied transsubstance cannibalizes the cannibalized, absent but present body. Johanna Frank suggests,
“Unlike the physical violence of the act of dismemberment, temporal violence results from an
encounter with a dismembered body of some sort, and that encounter is marked by the perpetual
failure to remember and re-member” (92). The play’s presentation of the representation of the
mimetic processes is at odds with its performative qualities. Mrs. Venable’s ritual, symbolic
monologues that recall Sebastian’s status as a work of art, his body, as the written word, and vice
versa, is a play that meditates on the possibility of any permanence in performance. The
possibility of the myriad contexts that produce the Venables as the Venables provide multiple
opportunities for revivification under her purview, but not in her control, not in her words, not
right now, but then, at this moment. Catherine’s temporal violence disallows Mrs. Venable’s.
In her “Statues, Jars, and Other Stored Treasures,” Johanna Frank suggests in this study
of the voice and its relation to the body that:
We might understand temporal violence as a remainder or residue of dismemberment. It
is marked by the failure to correlate the past with the present as a unified whole, and by
the failure to link what is, with what was, or what could have been . . . [C]ontemporary
drama has the potential to intervene in the violence of dismemberment by positing voice
as bound not to the body that is the source of voice but to the body of its receptor.

48

(92-93)
Sebastian’s mark/ing, via Catherine’s babbling, conflates past and present, into a unified whole
via through its persistent rendering rendered, holy/wholly/holey, and succeeds in mooring a
voice that is not his/but is his to a body that is re-lost and re-found. The failure to affirm or deny
the re-membering that is always-already breaking down connects Sebastian’s process to the
process of the play. Dismemberment, though, does not attain transubstantiation. Catherine voices
Sebastian’s corporeality and his history, and the lack thereof, simultaneously. The perpetual reevocation of this process is the process by which Sebastian, art, and the play itself become
subject to an unending cannibalism. It is not the written art in Sebastian’s notebook or in
Catherine’s journal that enacts this process. It is the talking, not the documentation that does this:
CATHERINE: . . .[Sebastian] took me downtown to a place for passport photos. Said:
“Mother can’t go abroad with me this summer. You’re going to go with
me this summer instead of Mother.”—If you don’t believe me, read
my journal of Paris!—“She woke up at daybreak this morning, had her
coffee and dressed and took a brief walk—”
DOCTOR: Who did?
CATHERINE: She did. I did—from the Hotel Plaza Athénée . . . as if pursued by a pack
of Siberian wolves! [She laughs her tired, helpless laugh]—Went right
through all stop signs—couldn’t wait for green signals—“Where did she
think she was going? Back to the Duelling Oaks?”—Everything chilly and
dim but his hot, ravenous mouth! on—
DOCTOR: Miss Catherine, let me give you something.
CATHERINE: Do I have to have the injection again, this time? What am I going to be
stuck with this time Doctor? I don’t care. I’ve been stuck so often that
if you connected me with a garden hose I’d make a good sprinkler.
...........
I didn’t feel it.
...........

49

DOCTOR: Miss Catherine? I want you to give me something.
...........
Give me all your resistance.
CATHERINE: Resistance to what?
DOCTOR: The truth. Which you’re going to tell me.
CATHERINE: The truth’s the one thing I’ve never resisted!
DOCTOR: Sometimes people just think they don’t resist it, but still do.
CATHERINE: They say it’s at the bottom of a bottomless well, you know.
(66, 67, 68)
If one simply read her journal, then all matters of doubt about what really happened will be
resolved, and everyone couldgo on believing whatever they wanted to believe, just as long as it is
not that particular story. Thus, when Catherine enters the scene, and Dr. Sugar interrogates her to
discover “what really happened” in the past, the past is always in front of her and absent.
Catherine recalls, “(T)he empty Blue Jay notebook got bigger and bigger, so big it was big and
empty as that big empty blue sea and sky . . .” (81).
Absence is a special quality of performance, in particular, as it pertains to writing.
“Writing,” according to Judith Roof, “is perceived to have an interpersonal dimension deeply
rooted in the psyches of all the filial players [poets, dramatists, playwrights], and the works of art
exist, in conversation with one another as synecdoches of their creators and representative
products of intergenerational struggles . . .” (9). The character of Sebastian emerges through the
absence of any actual writing, even though everyone in the play believes the writing exists,
especially because it has already been shown to be non-existent. Roof suggests that some plays,
such as those by Beckett and Pinter:
recast[] influence as the complexities of absence . . . Influence in their plays
50

is a matter of the ‘absent one,’ whose brooding omnipresence and impossible
address provides the occasion for drama . . . visions of a theatre whose nagging
preoccupation is the absent one, where drama derives from the effects of
absence . . . . (10)

Sebastian, the absent one, omni-presently nags as well, and he is absent, and more present in his
absence. Transubstantiated Sebastian, however, occurs through the triangulation of Catherine,
Doctor Sugar, and Mrs. Venable, which produces a different model of cannibalistic exchange for
theatre. When there is nothing but the material in the process of de-materialization, then, rematerialized, the absent nothing that preserves that “delusion of presence” (Roof 11) becomes
complicated in the specter of Sebastian’s cannibalization. In other words, there is no substitution;
there is only re-constitution through Sebastian. I am born again. Their tearing away at
Catherine’s telling makes her telling his, and his telling becomes ours, and our own consumption
of him is assured.
“The marvelous delusion of self,” claims Roof, “where absence may just as well be the
lack of self as the absence of someone else, and where the absence matters is finally the delusive
quality of presence” (11), becomes a marvelous counterweight for Sebastian’s transubstantiation
through cannibalism. For Mrs. Venable, Sebastian has a quality of illusion because of
Catherine’s obvious delusion. She qualifies his absence; she provides the elusive (to be gotten
away from) and certain quality of eating another human being (you can’t get away from that),
which provides her escape. She can be sure (assured) of that absence. She cannot be sure of that
delusive quality of presence any longer in the wake of Catherine’s talking, not because she is
realizing how she is in a dream, as she exclaims, “I think I’m just dreaming this, it doesn’t seem
real!” (52), per se, but rather, she cannot be sure of presence’s delusional qualities because
51

presence is being redefined through the hyper-material. okay now what is this? Because she
cannot get away from the material (in its absence), she cannot get away from the material (in its
present presence). There is nothing but the material; it is all representation. Representation is the
material of the play.
The purpose of Catherine’s interrogation is not to curb and control that infinity of
possible stories that compete and supersede Mrs. Venable’s. The purpose of lobotomizing
Catherine is to ensure that this consciousness, what Derrida calls, “the conscious presence of the
intention of the speaking subject” (14), is maintained, that the possibility of meaning continues,
but of course, the meaning upon which Mrs. Venable insists. There is no “intentional meaning”
in Catherine’s story. It can only disseminate into the crowd and rewrite or remark the Venables.
The attempt to mark the truth via the supposed marking of Sebastian’s body becomes
complex, as the talking cure and Mrs. Venable’s monologue, on the one hand, and the play’s
form that evokes a classical aesthetic, on the other, reflect back on themselves, turning on the
specter of Sebastian, hovering over the text’s promise for revelation that is never quite given, at
least in the play.
This specter, produced repeatedly through an uncertainty about what really happened,
transforms Sebastian into a perpetual state of being torn apart, of continually rupturing, further
holding and denying the play’s own cohesion. Thus, the promise of mediation, of understanding
through representation, of there really being a “really,” collapses upon this lingering metaphor
that is in a state of flux, not because he is dead, but rather because there is no poetry to begin
with, which, is not necessarily due to his not being a very good poet who never wrote (which is
possible), but is most necessarily due to his being, via his body, art itself. Since his body/art no
longer exists, what is it that the characters discuss exactly? The (re)marking and (iteration) of

52

Sebastian as text, as performance, occurs without any writing actually existing. Instead, his
poetry, his body/art occurs through its promise to be read, not to be performed, but that promise
depends upon an unacknowledged truth: Everybody knows it won’t because it had never been a
material truth, but the body/art becomes immaterially more real through its ritual evocation.
Sebastian’s, and by extension the family’s, myth that he is a heterosexual, tasteful, godlike poet who shall carry the legacy of the Venable name to new heights of immortality could be
perverted to one of infamy, of a homosexual, and of a potentially tasty pretender to the Venable
throne. Catherine’s story stymies and eats this legacy. The metaphor of cannibalism is potentially
literalized through her telling, both in its “original” enactment and in its being re-spoken and remarked, into what could possibly excite the tension between myth as truth and its production to
resonate back onto the metaphor of cannibalism to such an extent that the truth of the matter is
the meat of the matter. Sebastian transubstantiates via the cannibalizing of Catherine’s ritual-like
telling.
She reveals that for years, Sebastian and Mrs. Venable had taken vacations together
during the summer months. As in many of Williams’s works, the father figure is absent, (not
unlike Sebastian now that he is dead), and although Sebastian is in his forties before the play
begins, the nature of his behavior reflects a boy doted upon for far too long in this paternal
absence, still living at home and resting on laurels he never truly earned or deserved. Like the
father, though, he is also always present in his absence. The explicit reason Mrs. Venable gives
for his continued presence is because his art exists. He is, as his mother pontificates in a
soliloquy early on in the play, a poet, an artist who lives his work. It seems clear that he was not
very good and did not produce much, but rather, portended artistry, sans product. “His life was
the art,” Mrs. Venable exclaims to Sugar, and depending on what happened to him is rather

53

significant. Because his life is the art, the nature of what his death represents and the nature of
how representation functions—becomes interwoven with the act of discovery, or perhaps
manufacturing, depending on whether or not one believes Catherine’s babbling, which, will not
matter if she receives the lobotomy, per Mrs. Venable’s request. It is the potential for possibility
for difference and deferral to occur via the present absence, absent presence (and not absolute
absence) of writing as performance.
The cannibal figure offers what Roof suggests, that is, “an exploration of the power to
address the delusion of ontology as itself both method and matter of theatre” (22). Cannibalism
suggests that the delusion of representation is a delusion of the theatre is a delusion of the body.
So, if in Suddenly, Last Summer, cannibalism “occurs” offstage, but transubstantiates via
Catherine’s telling, then Chapter Two asks what happens when Sarah Kane’s Blasted recodes
simulated cannibalism onstage via absent grammatical stage directions, such as the “/” used to
indicate overlapping interruptions. There are no such marks. The actor, the reader, must imagine
where the interruptions must be. Neither the reader nor the performer are able to rehearse such
interruptions, per se. The absent symbol or code for interruptions, which is already devouring
other codings for the “/”, such as combination. The ghost of the “/”, its absence disrupts agreed
upon, more present symbols to denote activity. The figure of the cannibal in Kane’s Blasted
appears in a performative, grammatical fashion on the page in the form of the “/”: what if it does
not appear? A mark speaks and can effect transubstantiation just as a sound can.

54

Chapter 2
Sarah Kane’s Blasted: The Performative and Performance are the “Same”
Author’s note:
Punctuation is used to indicate delivery, not to conform to the rules of grammar.
A stroke (/) marks the point of interruption in overlapping dialogue.
Words in square brackets [ ] are not spoken, but have been included in the text to
clarify meaning.
Stage directions in brackets ( ) function as lines.
Editor’s note:
This edition of Blasted, first reprinted in 2000, incorporates minor revisions made to
the original text by Sarah Kane shortly before her death. It should therefore be
regarded as the definitive version in all respects.
from the opening of Blasted in the 2001 edition
Complete Plays, emphasis mine
Antonin Artaud

19

suggests that the emphasis on the words on the page in the theatre (the

dialogue) destroys the power that theatre can have. The stage’s power lies not in what the
characters are saying to one another, per se, but instead, in what the actors do. The dichotomy
between the text on the page and the text live, performed, must be collapsed somehow. He puts
out a call for more non-dialogued works, and Kane’s Blasted answers his call.
Performance, a sign too, can achieve its potential, with little, no, or at least, a re-written
sign. Artaud states, “It is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and
to recover the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought” (89).
19

Please note Kane’s response to a correlation of her work to Artaud’s. She states, “It's pretty
weird- because a lot of people said to me for a long time you must really like Artaud and I
hadn't read any of that. Artaud was recommended to me by a lecturer at university whom I
hated so much that I thought ' well I'm not gonna read it if he thinks Artaud is good. He simply
can't be.' So I only started reading him very very recently. And the more I read I thought ' now
this is a definition of sanity, this man is completely and utterly sane and I understand everything
he' s saying.' And I was amazed how it connects completely with my work. Also his writings
about theatre are stunningly good. And it’s amazing to me that I'd never read it.” interview
with Nils Tabert in Graham Saunders’ Love Me or Kill Me.
55

Sarah Kane’s Blasted offers an aesthetic third possibility that is singular in nature, for both
reader and performer, a third space not unlike what Artaud describes. Regardless of whether or
not the reader and the performer are the same individual, the act of reading and the act of
performing are not the same, and because of this difference in the activities, if the reader and the
performer are the same individual, a schizophrenic experience best describes the phenomenon of
reading to oneself, reading-to-be-performed outside of oneself, as a character or body on stage.
The audience and delivery are inherently different. Blasted’s use (or not) of grammatical
symbols results in an activity that eats itself, and Ian’s consumption of the dead baby at the end
of the play serves as a sign of this activity’s nature: It is cannibalistic.
By exciting signification to its maximum capacities, instead of writing a new kind of
visual code, Blasted un-writes those pertaining to linguistic signs. Note the Author’s Note that
precedes the script of the play; it alters the conventional meaning of a grammatical symbol, such
as the “( ).” The coding I once understood I must un-code and re-code for the purposes of
understanding this play, which means that the code formerly known as a mark in textual space,
the unspeakable, becomes a code of space, i.e., the performance on the stage.
Thus, the code for the “/” must un-coded and re-coded, too. However, it is never present
in the text. The reader and the actor both look for a sign that is never there, and as a result, it
becomes so glaringly visible in its intangibility that it becomes tangible; it performs. Typically,
the grammatical mark on the page has the potential to be performative, and the body in space
performs. In Kane’s play, the “/” cannot be performative because it never appears in the text, and
it performs as a result. For Lance Norman,

20

the “Author’s Note” above enacts this premise:

“These notes indicate that the activities are just as important as the lines themselves.”
20

Dr. Lance Norman, distilled from a series of panel presentations and intellectual debates, and condensed into a
representative for academic deliveries.

56

Traditionally speaking, one infers, actors put too much emphasis on the lines and not enough on
how to put them into action. In other words, the command that “[p]unctuation is used to indicate
delivery” expresses the anxiety over the word overpowering the “delivery.” The linguistic could
(as it might have in the past-?-) overtake the performance for the performer.
Striking a dissonant resonance for theatre conventions, rather than emphasizing “spoken
dialogue” (89), Blasted visually vibrates with recontextualized objects and gestures. Artaud
states:
[T]heir combinations [can] be carried to the point of becoming signs . . . Once
aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia,
the theater must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs . . . and make use of their
symbolism and interconnections in relation to all organs and on all levels. (90)

For Artaud, the way through the sign is through the excesses of signification.

21

Seeing and

coding a new kind of visual, bodied hieroglyphics, or language, whose “combinations be carried
to the point of becoming signs,” Artaud intimates that such an endeavor can ultimately unify
experience, or “all organs on all levels.” The “carrying” to a singular point, though, is still
dependent upon the sign, as “making a kind of alphabet out of these signs” is inevitable. “Once
aware of this language in space . . . the theatre must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs,”
which, suggests a new kind of mediating, perhaps even priest-like status of the theatre, re-turning

21

Ironically, one of the very things the theatre of cruelty attempts to escape is psychoanalysis,
a model this essay uses to define experience, i.e., the inherently indefinable.
57

it to its former status as a place of worship, wherein the tragedy in traigos

22

has to do more with

the actual sacrificing, rather than the simulation, substitution, or representation of the act.
Kane’s Blasted asks how the relationships between the linguistic and the material,
between the audience and the performer, between the processes of signification “on” and “off
stage” might be accessed in such a way as to reconsider the potential that “the written” and “the
performed” have. This chapter examines how, through the play’s presentation of presence, “how
in presenting, it offers” (Rayner 180) a new way to consider the unique status of words on the
page as objects on stage actually doing what the words of the page denote, rendering a kind of
collapse between the reading and performing experiences. Singularity arises.
For the reader, as to-be-performer, and for the performer, as once-having-had-alreadyread The Theatre and Its Double, this excess does not stop. It does, though, turn back in on itself.
In other words, Artaud’s text is the theatre, a performance/tive,

23

and the theatre has been

transformed (back) into a place for a kind of religious revival. The revival occurs in the
awareness of the non-language, performing in space. There are no interruptions designated by
the “/.” The actors believe they exist and behave accordingly. However, no one can find a
uniform, agreed-upon code that applies the “/.” Your interruption may not coincide with when I
think the interruption should come. The interrupting may, then, be “genuine.” Paradoxically,
Blasted shows that there is a singularity of experience between representation and actuality:
They eat each other; there is no difference between the two.

22

“Traigos” being the Greek orgin of the term, “tragedy,” refers to the goat that was sacrificed
at the Festival of Dionysus, which, once this festival became institutionalized and moved into
the theatre, the actual sacrificing faded from implementation.

23

Performance is the body, performing in space. The performative is the performance of
language. One might consider the latter via Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Derrida’s
essays in Limited, Inc.
58

Part I: Eating a dead baby
The movement between the actual and the represented is excited to such a degree that this
fluid and nearly indiscernible interchange appears to become stagnant and collapse. One might
equate what Mikhaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” as one way to consider this exchange
between action and awareness, or, to couch in terms of this argument, between performance and
the performative. In the instance of the “Author’s Note,” the performative form of it and the
performance of it upon the reader become indistinguishable. In the “Author’s Note,” the divide
between the performer and the reader begins to close. This process occurs in a mutually
cannibalistic way. “The delivery wants to be the words; the words want to be the delivery.” The
delivery becomes indiscernible, or rather, indisectable from the non-words (“not to the rules of
grammar”) on the page.
How does one consider the experience itself when faced with this idea? If writing is as, if
not more powerful than performance, then performance artists and theorists, as well as dramatists
and playwrights, argue that the performance (shall) overshadow and transcend the linguistic sign
exactly because the performance is not a sign. Are reading and performing the same, or at least,
close enough not “to worry about it?” What happens for the reading and performing experience
in such a scenario? For the reader, Kane’s Blasted offers more insight into this half of the
dramatic process, through the reading/performing of the notes. Enactment equals cannibalism;
there is no difference between representation and actuality. The performance eats the text; the
text eats the performance.
However, this difference is not apparent unless one reads the script. There are stage
directions, endnotes, and grammatical punctuations that are to be enacted but are unseen, on

59

stage. Not unlike a Eucharistic ritual, the idea is to conflate representation and actuality by
hiding the symbol or the act of transference. One way to do so is to relate the text to real events.
24

Several studies of Blasted , although exclaiming a condensation of sorts does occur
between representation and actuality, the attempts of teasing the inside world of the theater to the
outside world of, say, Bosnia, are attempts to maintain those divisions. For example, Graham
Saunders calls certain acts that occur on stage in Blasted “extreme” acts. He immediately ties
these acts to current events. Such an act is self-assurance that the two are always separate.
“Nothing can happen to me in this theatre.” Saunders asks Kane about the intent or the
motivation that lie behind the play. She confesses that after seeing the siege of Srebrenica,
Bosnia in 1995 on television the “penny dropped”: “[T]his [tragedy] is absolutely terrible and
I’m writing this ridiculous play . . . so I now know what I wanted to write about . . . the
connection between . . . a Leeds hotel room and what’s happening in Bosnia . . . one is the seed
and the other the tree” (“‘Out Vile’ 71). What does this gesture, after-the-fact, mean? It means
that the play, on its own, is uncomfortable, not because meaning is being applied to the play, but
rather, because meaning cannot be found outside of the theatricality of the theater, on the page.
The experience of the play in the theatre may or may not have such an e/affect on an audience.
An audience may or may not “get” that connection Kane and Saunders reference. However,
when reading the play, Ian’s act of eating the dead baby precludes any further ability to use the
play as a metaphor. Seeing is not believing.

24

Although this chapter does not have the space to do a comprehensive evaluation of
dramatic studies and performance theories, I contend that this tension in the twentieth and
twenty-first century United States, between drama and performance studies, is an extension of
this tension. Both fields ask a similar question: “Can I get beyond language? Do I want to? And if
I can, what value comes from it?”
60

Until this point, Ian eating that baby is safe. I do not believe he is eating that baby. There
is no baby. It is just a doll of some sort . . . right? Ian’s act is safe. It is representation, and I feel
assured in that separation. The illusion must be maintained, and the plastic doll, the script on the
page provides that safe distance that I need. Graham Saunders suggests that once the hotel
explodes, the processes of writing and of performing are revealed to be separate. He states, “The
fractured dramatic form of Blasted . . . is suddenly transformed into an undisclosed war zone,
[which] reflects the sudden change in subject matter during the process of writing” (38). Writing
reveals itself via the change in subject matter. But the matter that is on the stage is not the matter
of the play. Anthony Kubiak asserts that “the preponderant voices in theater and performance
theory are of a constructivist, cultural materialist bent, positions that tend to critique theater and
performance as document or event or cultural formation from a position seemingly outside the
theatrical, or, conversely, through the idea of the performative as a controlling metaphor” (xi).
Kubiak does not use the term “performative” to apply to the performance of the linguistic; this
study, however, suggests the concept of a self-aware performance state hides the ability to see
the condensed, overlapped image of the cannibal and the form of the play, one consuming the
other, which, is another layer of cannibalism.
The explosion does not signal a move away from the naturalistic setting of the expensive
hotel room to the symbolic one of post-apocalyptic-wherever. The setting reveals itself to be just
that, setting. That setting dismembers itself, and in that dismemberment, an awareness of its
construction becomes apparent to the audience. It is fake. Perhaps if I had read the play, I would
not be so aware that the experience is only an aesthetic one. Kane’s play suggests through the
set’s self-dismemberment that there is no difference between the seeing and the reading. The set
is as real as anything else.

61

Saunders expresses a desire to reconcile the text of the performance with the text of what
is read, (The “Author’s Note” is typically overlooked),25 yet, to satisfy such desire, he must move
away from the play on stage to the play on the page, and he does so by authorizing the author
and the written word, “I want to see how what I read, what the Author wrote, correlates with
what I am seeing, right now, in this very room . . . and also to Bosnia.” Here is the real
authorizer.
The aesthetic absence of the page usurps the material presence of the stage. Ironically, by
looking so intently at Kane’s writing, denying one’s “own” reading experience, one also denies
her experience with the play, as it is compared to Kane’s writing, or at least, what is imagined to
be “hers.” “I don’t want these two activities to be different; I need continuity; so, I will deny my
own interpretation and my own experience, in the wake of the aesthetic formality I imagine to be
there, which I shall prove ‘is’ there via the ‘evidence’ of the hotel’s destruction, the play’s selfdestruction.” She must pass through self-denial in order to confirm the self. “Just because there is
no material proof of what I had imagined contextually while I read, I will believe there will be
proof, a prop, or an act, that I had not anticipated, which denies my previous understanding of
the text. I must deny that to reclaim my-self.”
The ability to deny depends upon clear subject/object binaries to exist, however fluid they
might be. Cannibalism can serve to undo the binaries altogether. Annette Pankratz begins to
touch on the subjective/objective tension in “Neither here nor There: Theatrical Space in Kane’s
Work.” Focusing on the processes of mimesis,

25

26

Pankratz indicates that Kane’s plays “explore

Note this is a performative act, enacting the paratextual.

26

She defines “mimesis” as the processes of representation, i.e., only insofar as language is
concerned, even though it performs according to Derrida, the ‘liveness’ is still unique for her.
Performance, especially in Kane’s work, is described in the following manner: “Deictic markers
62

the divisions between inside and outside, between the bodies of the actors and the narrative
mind-spaces of the play . . . with the entrance of the Soldier [for example] the mimetic space
literally explodes and the referential points towards all places torn by civil war” (151). Thus,
when the actual topography of the play falls apart, then, the play itself dis-integrates. The set
reveals itself via the formal integration of the work, as dressing, as aesthetic representation.
The form of the text, both as a play on the page and as a play on the stage, dis-integrates
its own form, which is literalized with the destruction of the set itself, which the language and
the actions on stage defy any attempts to understand the play as only representation. Thus, as the
hotel is blown apart, so too is the ability to grasp hold of the functioning of the play is lost in its
symbolic meaning, even if that symbolic meaning is that there is not one.
On the contrary, and to reiterate, it is as this moment that the play begins its eventual
collapse. Rather than ending with an explosion, the metaphorical and topographical landscapes
overlap (as the “/” suggests): as the set explodes, it is “gotten into” by Ian, as he crawls
underneath. As he is underneath the floorboards, he eats the baby. One prop explodes; another
enters into it and then puts another piece of the play back into itself. This process is one of
mutual cannibalism. A collapse made possible via things being torn apart and eventually
recombined in very particular ways: The metaphor and the performance overlap. This process
applies to the reader as well. But how?
27

[(Supplement)]

such as personal pronouns or adverbs help to maintain the illusion that what we see on stage is
part of a dynamic, complex and complete world . . . bodies on stage and the liveness . . . create
a performance space, which is both real and virtual. [The characters seem to exist in an] ‘as if’
world but [ ] are actually present in the ‘here and now.’ Performance oscillates between
indexicality and iconcity, between presence and representation.”
27

Paraleptical/Paratextual cannibalism
63

In Ian’s case, he cannot read: the terrain, others’ intentions, his own; . . . he especially
cannot read the final moments of the play, as he regresses/progresses toward an infantile-like
state, unable to express himself fully, even with language. Peter Buse suggests that Ian’s
“journalistic haste—to meet a deadline, to capture a readership—only represses further the
meaning of a traumatic event. Ian is obviously a bad witness: . . . he is detached, both literally
and symbolically, from those events” (185), he transcribes to his editor at the beginning of the
play. They always want to supplement. The reading on the page is yet another “ravage[ing] [that]
Ian’s body undergoes and the testimony, written on the body, of the events he has participated in
. . .” (186). The reader recodes and rewrites Ian by consuming his testimony.
Cate, on the other hand, does read Ian. However, she cannot speak this reading that she is
doing. She stu-stu-stutters. Ian berates her over and over throughout the first act. “Pst-pst-pst…,”
he bellows, mocking her inability to articulate herself. Cate reads without seeing. She speaks
through the stuttering sounds, which cannibalize Ian’s prioritization of codified language.
Because Ian values simplicity, facts which he can see and hear, as he has been trained to see and
hear, he cannot see himself as a text to be read. This so-called journalist’s search for facts to
write becomes the very body that is as materially readable and marked a text as the script of the
play to be read, probed, and penetrated, to be consumed, digested, and reconstituted.
The act of penetration provides an opening and a closing into the body (of work).

28

There

is always some-thing that will be missed, though, so the reader may not get beneath the code, as
Ian does the floorboards in Blasted, not entirely; however, the reader may get “closer” to seeing
transparency, while still being unable to see through the curtain of signification entirely. Through

28

“Every exit is an entrance; every entrance, an exit.” Lead Player, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead.
64

an implosion of presentation and representation, Blasted allows for this to occur, however
briefly.
This cannibalism of the act of reading a material body applies to the immaterial as well.
The lack of “/” manifests on stage, but it is only visible on the page. The spatial movement
outside the performance to symbolic meaning, whether committed by the actor or the audience
member, requires a temporal shift as well, from “right now in the theatre” to “at that time over
there, then.” Temporal, as well as spatial states must shift outside and “mean something,” just so
long as that something is “something else, unrelated to me.”
The best way to disavow that something is to supplement, to supplement with historical
legacies, for example. Andrew Sofer attaches such meaning to his study of props on the
European stage. He suggests that props are not just some things scattered about, but instead,
show the dual function of the objects as both “more than” representations and also as
“signifying” or indicative of the time in which a certain object, like a handerchief or gun, is used.
John Bell, contesting this claim, excavates out of Sofer’s theory in The Stage Life of Props a
desire for present-ness, or live-ness, which the critic John Bell bemoans as self-delusion and
wishful thinking on the part of playwrights and critics. He states that:
Sofer wishes to restore the phenomenological factor to the study of performing
objects . . . [yet] he bases his analysis of props primarily upon stage directions
and dialogue. Sofer writes in that special tense dear to literary criticism: the
imaginary theatrical present . . . Sofer’s argument . . . relies upon a method that
eschews the messiness of actual performance for the sureties of literary
criticism. (emphasis mine, TDR)

65

The play images the immaterial. The always-already theatrical present that Bell refers to is an
attempt to avoid the very thing Bell commits: Blurring the actual with the represented. Time is
Bell’s way around the absolute inability to account for the reader, who actually creates and
maintains the imaginary theatrical present. The present-ness (presence in the present) of the live
aspects of theatre does not rest in seeing the play, but rather, in reading it. Despite this necessary
disbelief in the ability of a reading performance to have that kind of power, the tension in Blasted
lies in the play’s ability to disavow and simultaneously confirm this distance between the reader
and the read-play, and between the audience and the play-performed. The ability to reserve the
right to doubt the play’s influence, its affective authenticity, is washed away in the wake of this
simultaneity. The performance is full of doubt and immediacy and danger: Something may
“actually” happen during the play, hence, Artaud. The latter is full of the search for certainty
through contemplation and analysis, of mediation and distance, of safety: The audience member
says to herself, “Nothing will ‘actually’ happen while one reads the text, at least, not materially,
right?”
If one considers the hotel room in Blasted as a prop, one might consider Ian as one also,
at the very least, when the Soldier sodomizes Ian with a rifle, Ian is objectified. In other words,
one is as “prop-y” as the other. The thingness of Ian’s status as sodomized object does not reside
in his objectification by the rifle, per se, nor in his being on stage. “Thingness is [ ] not an
attribute of an object,” according to Raynor, “but something more like an event or a moment
when a material object is recognized as belonging to more than its representation, to more than is
knowable, but also belonging to time and to mortality” (189). Ian is not really limited in his
objectness, for his thingness transcends this. The meaning of this event or of any event, or all
events in the play, these contextual moments ensure that Ian will continue to “matter,” if not in

66

his material presence, in his aesthetic absence. Raynor describes interaction with these objects as
a gift exchange:
It is [a] brief [experience] because the gift only appears in the moment of giving;
it thus also entails a memory of the first loss [, i.e., of being given, received, lost]
and a grieving. [This paradox, in the] [t]angibile, [ ] marks their own
disappearance from time past as well as their
persistence into the present. In their double nature they are uncanny
because one wonders about their reality even as they give sensory
testimony. (189, 190, 191)

“Getting” meaning is a gift that comes at a cost: one must always be in a perpetual state of grief
and doubt. Yet, in Kane’s Blasted, that promise of doubting what one sees is precluded due to
this collapse between performance and the performative. The author’s intentions begin to have
everything to do with what is done through and with and to the play, and, as imagined as these
intentions are, the announcement at the opening of the play, to which only the reader is privy.
Annabelle Singer emphasizes the performance and its visceral affects via Blasted’s
formal structures’ self-destruction in order to show that the mimetic faculty serves the purpose of
valuing the stage over the page. The spectator must “understand” the play with her emotions,
which becomes not just the spectator’s, but everyone else’s as well.29 Singer states:
The visceral drama that Kane promotes bypasses interpretation and, instead
directly confronts the audience’s thoughts and feelings through physical
reactions . . . [which opens up a] wider concept of performance. This concept

29

I choose Singer’s argument at length because it allows for several key points of this work to
surface, not because of any individual “issue” with her argument.
67

insists upon an intense connection with the spectator . . . So, while violence
perpetrated destroys the self, pain communicated turns an individual’s reality into
everyone’s reality. (141, 153)

Rather than valuing the play via the reader, Singer does so via the performer in order to glean a
transcendental, collective, unconscious experience which she finds as the value of Kane’s work
in general. In her study of Cleansed, Singer, like Saunders in his study of Blasted, wishes for a
collapse between reading and performing, between author and auditorium, between self and
other. She states:
Graham’s ability to disembody saves Grace: he teaches her to do it too. But her
wounds embody Graham: he bleeds empathetically. Graham’s experience is an
‘unthought’ physical reaction, implying that his empathy is not just a mental
projection, but an experience of the pain itself . . . collapsing boundaries between
self and other . . . [which] collapse[s] the boundaries between life and death.
[Thus, Grace’s] electroshock therapy [in Cleansed], which precedes the surgery
[the sex-change], leaves Grace undone. . . . The surgery is actually the only thing
that revives Grace . . . now she can speak again. Now she has the body of
Graham, now they can really feel the same through the same Body. Grace no
longer exists as a single-subject; she has dispersed . . . . (154, 155, 156, 157)

The Soldier emphasizes the materiality of Ian’s eyes in Blasted, for example, by sucking them
out of his head and then eating them. The Soldier then immediately kills himself. Ian asks Cate
to help him commit suicide because life is not worth living when trapped in the material cage of
the body. This overemphasis on the object culminates with the baby’s consumption. When Ian’s

68

objectification (via the Soldier’s rape) is re-subjectified (consuming the dead baby/being
consoled by Cate, who has also been objectified via rape by Ian), the proveability of the material
is not only called into question, but it appears to disappear in the wake of the image of
cannibalism and its representative powers. For this reason, the stichomythic exchange spawns
laughter, not horror:
IAN. Will you help me Cate?
CATE. How.
IAN. Find my gun?
.........
. . . Can you keep that baby quiet?
CATE. It’s not doing anything. It’s hungry.
IAN. We’re all bloody hungry, don’t shoot myself I’ll starve to death.
CATE. It’s wrong to kill yourself.
IAN. No it’s not.
CATE. God wouldn’t like it.
IAN. There isn’t one.
CATE. How do you know?
IAN. No God. No Father Christmas. No fairies. No Narnia. No fucking nothing.
CATE. Got to be something.
IAN. Why?
CATE. Doesn’t make sense otherwise.
..........
Thought you didn’t want to die.

69

IAN. I can’t see.
CATE. My brother’s got blind friends. You can’t give up.
IAN. Why not?
CATE. It’s weak.
IAN. I know you want to punish me, trying to make me live.
When asked about proving whether or not God exists, Ian simply responds with further
abstractions. “I’m blind; that’s enough.” Father Christmas and the land of Narnia are as childlike
and pathetically hopeless as one can get. Ian does not want a father; he wants a mother. The
Oedipal gets unmoored in this moment of cannibalism, and, hope lies not in the idea that there is
not an Author, in so far as Ian is concerned, but rather that there is a divine that can be reached,
rendering the focus on the hyper-material a focus on the absence of presence, materially
speaking. Note Ian’s death:
Ian lying very still, weak with hunger.
...................
Ian tears the cross out of the ground, rips up the floor and lifts the baby’s body
out.
He eats the baby.
He puts the remains back in the baby’s blanket and puts the bundle back in the
hole.
A beat, then he climbs in after it and lies down, head poking out of the floor.
He dies with relief.
It starts to rain on him, coming through the roof.
Eventually.
IAN. Shit.
(emphasis mine, 60)

70

In the wake of Ian’s objectification of Cate/objectification by the Soldier, he objectifies the baby
by eating it. He subjectifies the baby by eating it (it is now a part of him). He is no longer
“wholly” himself. He is transformed (all notions that have been applied to cannibalism).
However, Ian does not die. He opens the play with “I’ve shat in better places,” and he ends the
play in nearly the same way, wording “Shit.” Because he is not dead, “dead” becomes “just a
word.” “Eventually,” too, moves from being ambiguous to being ambivalent to being irrelevant.
At first, it reads as though the rain comes through the roof, but after a long while. Then, it reads
as though his declaration, “Shit,” comes, but after a long while. Then, it reads as if both,
simultaneously, might be the case.
The object is supposed to be, or rather, it must be felt, seen, touched, somehow. The
subject is supposed to be the opposite of this, somehow. When the language has been re-coded,
then un-coded, when the form defies its own content, and, when the action has been re-coded and
then un-coded, when the content defies its own form, an overlap occurs wherein mimesis is
shown to be a process of cannibalism, rather than a process of imitation. “I do not want to simply
imitate, or even surpass what I see, I want what I see to be a part of me, so that, in the end, there
will be only me.” In Blasted, geographical topography (the set of the hotel/Leeds) gives way to
cultural relativity (what is violence, exactly?), gives way to biological sustenance (there are no
taboos; eat what you have), gives way to half-baked metaphysical ponderings, gives way to a
non-oedipal mother because the text, like the content within, eats itself.
Ian consumes the dead baby under the floorboards, and this presentation of the taboo of
taboos does what the “Author’s Note” does: The symbolic and the representational collapse with
each other. Ian’s act slows the explosion of signification that is literalized by the set exploding.
Ian’s act confuses the formal revelation of representation (the explosion of the hotel), a reflexive

71

occurrence, and pulls the performer and the reader back together, a paraxive occurrence. Much
work has been done on this concept of paratextuality, as it relates to the text. Kane’s “Author’s
Note” is a fine example of a paratext. Any footnote, endnote, preface, Editor’s Note, or
grammatical punctuation that are assigned without the writer30 may be considered paratexts. For
Phillippe Lejeune, the paratext is “une frange du texte imprimé qui en réalité contrôle sa lecture
l’ensemble du texte”

31

(45). This chapter looks to apply this concept in “more than” one way,

i.e., to the text only.
Part II: Marks, Objects, Excess, and Authorial Intent
How does materiality work in lieu of the recoding of language and the encoding of
performance in Kane’s Blasted? What happens to all that spilled blood? What happens to the
“more than” or excess? It collides in on itself and is consumed and reconstituted, as it
reconstitutes. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom points out that writers (and I include
readers in this instance) presume to be in some kind of conversation with those who preceded
them, and one result of this psychological process is that the creation of a work of art as in
“conversation with one another as synecdoches of their creators” (9). If, as the Author’s Note
reads, the stage directions emphasize action, and, it has gone to so much trouble to re-code the
visual language as much as the written word, perhaps creating a new visual economy, then where
are the “/” that indicate overlap, that concept that cannibalism em-bodies? In other words, the
subtextual conversation, through the art, between reader and writer is more important than the
primary text on some level. Thus, one automatically begins the hyper-critical, aware
performance of the text, looking for that essence. It is there, and it eats itself. The absence of the

30
31

I am distinguishing “writer” from Foucault’s concept of the “author.”
“A fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”
72

“/” becomes more present in its absence. The futile search, the performance, collapses with and
reconstitutes the (missing) performative.
[“/”-where are they?]
Gérard Genette suggests such a liminal space is a paratext, a “threshold [(seuil)] between
the text and off-text . . .”; he states that [it is] a zone of transition . . . and transaction . . . [it is] a
privileged place” (2). This liminal space or interstice, this concept of fluidity that has appeared in
a variety of philosophical modes of inquiry for the last thirty years, which Pierre Bourdieu’s
work on cultural production reflects. In the case of the concept of the paratext, it is:
not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer,
etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics,
publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined
efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of
art as such. (Bourdieu 37)

The text produces a sense of ownership for the consumer, and the “consumer’s” awareness is an
extension of that sense of control over a work of art. The extension serves to enable one to
distance oneself from the awareness that these agents have anything to do with the relationship
between object and subject in the first place. What happens through the experience of reading
Blasted is that, formally (aesthetics), one can understand consumption as a desire to eat the work
of art, to make it one’s “own,” in some manner or other.
The reader’s sense of ownership increases the closer the reader gets to the end of the
play, and the ability to consider anything that precedes the main text, the hypotext, as it were,
cannot be teased out of and considered “separate from.” Ownership depends on the paratextuality

73

of the reading experience, which ultimately leads to what Beverly Skeggs calls “affect stripping”
(15). This is, she claims:
a process whereby affects are detached from the body of production and re-made
as an exchange-value when re-attached to the body that does not produce the
same affect but can capitalize on it . . . disgust evolved to protect the human
being from coming too close . . . [one must] maintain [ ] the symbolic
order. (qtd. in Aston 14, 15, 17)

“Coming too close” to the border of humanity/to the work/to oneself/et al, reveals a fear that
“deictic markers such as personal pronouns or adverbs,” for example, “help to maintain the
illusion that what we see on stage is part of a dynamic, complex and complete world . . . bodies
on stage and the liveness . . . create a performance space, which is both real and virtual . . .
performance oscillates between presence and representation” (Pankrantz 149, 151). The fear in
that lack of “owning,” whether that be the “author’s” or the reader’s fear, is an awareness that is
manifested in the lack of there being any “/” in the 2001 edition of Kane’s play that is in the
authorized version.
The search for something that is both there and not there, and the oscillation between the
two fuses so many potential would-be subjects and seen-objects together, and so quickly, that
temporarily, there appears to be a collapse of the dichotomy between them. As Annette
Pankrantz suggests, the play “explores the divisions between inside and outside, between the
bodies of the actors and the narrative mind spaces of the play” (151). What happens, though,
when a sign or object collapses the narrative mind spaces of the play by providing objects that
have been defamiliarized, “autonomous from language . . . that points to itself [(the object)]
rather than an external referent”? (Sofer 25)
74

Although Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props does not use “a-subjective” or
“hypo/er objective” to articulate the workings of stage props, his text proves useful in order to
help answer how to consider taboos outside of external referents, especially when the divisions
between subject and object have been obliterated/reinforced. John Bell considers Sofer’s study
and contends that the argument, like so much of literary criticism, depends upon the false notion
of “live-ness.” The threat is that the temporal, like the written word, can consume the spatial, the
form, and questions persist regarding the status of the subjective and the objective.
Critics such as Ken Urban consider how its own community32 of dramatists has reacted
to her play. Blasted’s form, for Urban, is “not dominated by dialogue, her plays use images and
movement to re-imagine the British stage” (40). The literary critic Chris Wixson goes further to
suggest that not only is the play not dominated by dialogue, or language, but that the acting
bodies, or objects, on stage convey what cannot be expressed through language. Blasted suggests
that the dialogue is the material, is the body. Critics such as Elaine Aston go so far to contend,
for example, that “[t]he images of reviews, the words on the page, have a physicality . . . that
makes them [reviews] a part of the fabric of the show. If this is the case, Blasted echoes a
concept not unlike Marvin Carlson’s notion of ghosting,

33

wherein a particular play’s meaning,

through both form and content, precedes the actual production. My reading a review about
Blasted before I see it colors my experience of it. (Un)cannily enough, then, this study, too,
evokes similar methodologies to encounter the play, and by extension, shows the limitations of
them.

32

Kane states in an interview that one must be careful “not to confuse press with audience.”
From Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on
Playwriting, (130).
33

See The Haunted Stage.
75

Wixson considers the limitations of language and concludes that the body usurps the
spoken because the material cannot be denied. In his “‘In Better Places’: Space, Identity, and
Alienation in Sarah Kane’s Blasted,” Wixson states:
Blasted depicts the violence that underlies all symbolic mapping (Cate’s and
Ian’s rape) as well as focusing upon the ways in which the corporeal eludes
orientatational inscription . . . In my initial interest in the apparent limits of
theory (which I now perceive also as the limits of language), the inability of
theory to manifest the material, or useful body, I searched for those
circumstances in which the body is undeniable, when the body’s material
presence is a condition of the circumstance. Interestingly, one is that of pain, and
another is that of live performance: two cases when the body must be
acknowledged. (par. 15)
The materiality of theoretical modes of inquiry dis-inscribes the undeniability of the marked
body. “If I feel pain for long enough, I won’t feel it anymore.” One might consider this as one
might consider a narcissist who continually looks inward. To constantly look for the
undeniability of the object is to miss the deniability of the subject. One cannot lose sight of her
ability to doubt. Pointing in towards itself long enough inevitably forces any reference to
uncertainty, “Is that really happening on stage?” to absolute certainty, “Of course not.” Let one
not ever doubt that once “put up there,” whether known or not, it is an object (of art). The fear
that “That…touch touch touch” is more than that…that there is excess of the body that cannot be
accounted for…that meaning, inversely, may be all too clear: There is nothing but the
represented (body), as Ian finds out at the end of the play. Perhaps the ending is a romance,

76

reassigning the taboo of cannibalism a sweet turn, like a kiss on the cheek. Perhaps also the
ending reveals that the consumption of the other is not material at all.
Use representation more, to remind us that the body is the more, and, all that there is. The
34

characters, as well as the reader, wish to fall back on the word of the author , the authorized
word on the matter at hand for Ian and Cate. They cannot, however, reach her. he reflexive and
the reflective. In Ellen Kaplan’s study of Kane’s plays Crave and 4:48 Psychosis, the processes
of signification fall back on the author’s shoulders (Author’s Note). Kaplan states, “The mental
and emotional collapse seem to be taking place within the consciousness of the writer, offering a
more despairing picture of disintegration” of the self” (120). Greig, among others, opposes this
reading of authorial biography onto the work. Kaplan’s essay is published by Intellect, a
publishing company that prides itself in sticking to the author’s power. Its website states, “We
differ from other publishers by campaigning for the author rather than producing a book or
journal to fill a gap in the market.” The gap in the market exists in part because of this
privileging of the author. The campaigning for the author creates and sustains that gap.
Cannibalism in drama collapses the body of work with the body of the author in such a way that
the newly constituted entity that cannot be qualified enables a death before birth from with-in/out
that gap.
Cannibalism, in all its excess, does not dissipate, per se, but it does “fill” all kinds of gaps
and has done so for quite some time, perhaps always. It is a sign that marks the fringes of
humanity, the borders of conscience, as well as the borders between self and other. For Graham
Saunders, the taboo helps to create a “space where convention and language itself [ ] collapse
into non-iterability, to be replaced by Kane’s poetics of corporeality and populated by bodies of

34

See “part iii” for further explanation.
77

pain” (4). These bodies, Saunders continues, “are merged violently with their environment . . .
Cate’s transporting interludes [, for example,] are similar to Kane’s explosive moments of spatial
reconfiguration and graphic violence in that all are able to elude naturalistic currents, creating a
textual hole that disturbs the phenomenological foundation that grounds identity in environment”
(4, 5). Identity is grounded to the author in Saunders’ assessment. The “disquieting effect . . . her
metaphorical landscape” (Saunders) has can be assuaged by the author. The dramatist Una
Chauduri defines this feeling of disquiet a kind of “static exilic consciousness” (qtd. in Saunders
4) through a “staging of violence that violates the rules of representation and convention within
what is designated as theatrical space” (Saunders 4).
In the instance of Blasted, the evocation of cannibalism does not evoke a zone of
transition and transaction/graphic violence toward spatial reconfiguration. The cannibalism
(content) of the play mimics the cannibalism (form) of the play which mimics the functionality
35

of the “( )” , which eats its own intended purpose. Further, the Author’s Note, regardless of its
(stated) purpose, coupled with the Editor’s Note, produces yet another layer of cannibalism.
Herein lies a moment that collapses the reflexive (performance) and reflective (reading)
experiences into a “new” kind of aesthetic experience, which reveals signification to be an
infinite affair, due to its self-splintering, that finally cannibalizes itself, which then, blows apart
again. The presentation of Ian’s cannibalistic act inverts the play’s formal self-destruction, i.e.,
an explosion on stage. The metaphor of cannibalism, and all that it signifies, is interwoven with
its presentation: There is no material aesthetic; there is only aesthetic immateriality. The excess
transforms the prop. In an interview with Graham Saunders, Kane exclaims that upon seeing the
play for the first time the prop exceeds her intent for it:
35

Which, if one considers that the Author’s Note asks that the conventional understanding of
the aside be dropped, then this adds yet another layer to the paratextuality of the play.
78

In Blasted Ian’s almost kind of deified I think in a way that I didn’t realize until
I saw it performed. I went in for the technical run and when I watched at the end
and he had all this blood and it started raining, and the blood was washed away,
I thought it was kind of Christ-like. (LMKM 64)
The performance does not match what she wrote. Kane expresses an awareness that the
performative nature of writing can usurp the performative nature of speech, which is often
valued at the expense of the written.

36

However, Kane’s note expresses an anxiety that the

opposite might occur during the performance: The actor might just spend a little too much time
worrying over her lines, rather than on the performance of those lines.

37

Does Kane’s note

suggest a movement back to the operational because too much time is spent focusing on the
writing, so much so that the writing has lost its power or edge?
In his Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, Graham Saunders
points out that Kane distinguishes between the play on the page and the play on stage. He states,
“Kane draws a [ ] distinction between performance in the theatre and text for performance” (17).
For Kane, the reading experience threatens the performance:
Increasingly, I’m finding performance much more interesting than acting; theatre
more compelling than plays. Unusually for me, I’m encouraging my friends to see
my play Crave before reading it, because I think of it more as text for
performance than as a play. (emphasis mine, qtd. in Saunders 17)

36
37

Derrida’s claim may be found primarily in his Of Grammatology.
Refer to her Author’s Note.
79

The performance touches “other things” that reading cannot, or should not color first, at least.

38

“Performance is visceral,” Kane notes in a 1998 interview in The Guardian, “It puts you in direct
physical contact with thought and feeling” (qtd. in Saunders 17). One still cannot unmoor the
object-ness of the live-ness that is theatre/plays.
Saunders touches on an anxiety over the collapse of the performance and the
performative, which is expressed in this desire to escape the symbolic, the mark, the code.
Saunders states, “In an uncanny echo of the initial reactions Blasted was to provoke, Tom Morris
expressed the disquiet he felt about being in such close proximity to graphic staged violence:
Watching the cruelest of these plays in a small studio theatre is like watching a
simulated rape in your living room. In very small theatres, it is impossible to walk
out, so the audience is trapped in close proximity to the action, giving the
playwright free reign to have his or her own say in the bluntest possible
terms. (qtd. in Saunders 5)
Is it the violence? Or, is it that the distance between representation, simulation, and actuality gets
a little too close for comfort? Kane denotes quite the opposite experience occurs when seeing her
work: It is precisely because people can leave (and have) that the live-ness, the danger, the
spontaneity, or performative aspects of the work can perhaps transcend its moorings. She states:
The first previews of Blasted at the Royal Court—before I had any idea of
quite how extreme the reaction was going to be we had a couple of people
walk out . . . And now I think it’s bound to happen. If it doesn’t then its
probably because something is not working. I’ve seen productions of
Blasted where there was no reason to walk out because somehow they never
38

Is this a double-negative/double-bind? In other words, how does a desire to avoid “coloring”
the seeing of the play correlate with the request that parentheses be recalibrated?
80

connected emotionally, you could completely distance yourself from what
was going on. (qtd. in Saunders 14)
The live-ness of the performance, as opposed to the play, does not keep one in her seat, nor does
it force one to leave. This difference in opinion reveals a similar anxiety about the power of the
overlapping of the symbolic and the operative. Tom Morris is afraid to get up. Sarah Kane is
terrified that he won’t. What’s at stake here? The play doesn’t need the actors or the audience.
Summer Neilson Moshy indicates such a fear by collapsing the reader and the performer, in an
attempt to emphasize the live performance, over the text. By emphasizing it is the text that
“contains gaps wherein the reader/performer inserts his/her personal understanding” (44), she
authorizes the live performance instead:
The infiltration of self, as either audience or performer, coincides with all live
productions. However, the gap-filing and theatric alliance processes instigated
by Kane’s texts intensify this immersion of self into performance text . . . Kane’s
work creates a wedge between the text-bound theatre production and an
experiential Artaudian production . . . to an experience ultimately ‘free’ from
the text itself. (44-45)
The text is the text. There is but a difference of degree (perhaps) between the text on the page
and that on the stage. The necessary delusion of separation is what Artaud wants to destroy by
disavowing, nearly, one in lieu of the other, which is quite probably impossible to do. By
paraleptically passing over the text, Moshy emphasizes the performance in the guise of
“experience,” tied to the event, the performance/performative. In other words, Moshy advocates
a kind of phenomenology.

81

The audience does not need to stay in the theatre in order for the show to go on, despite it
influencing the performance, however slightly that may be (Kane qtd. in Saunders 9). Why is it
that the audience shall not be reading her plays before seeing them, but, the performance can
transcend that experience, nevertheless, and despite the limitations of the form of theatre? For
Kane, “form is content” (Stephenson and Langridge 130), and to want to distance the play from
the theatre is to reveal a fear of the power of the reader, who, Graham Saunders figures outside
of the reciprocal processes at work in performance. In his assessment of her assessment of how
performance optimally works, Saunders states, “Kane’s vision, like her Renaissance
predecessors, is also an uncompromising one. For her, tragedy [meaning drama in general-?] is a
case of the writer, actor and audience” (21). How much, if any, credence one assigns Saunders’
claim, the reader still has a definitive role to play when the writer, actor, and audience “descend
into hell imaginatively in order to avoid going there in reality” (Kane from Rage and Reason
133).
That Kane perceives a real difference between representation and actuality reinforces the
fear, not that hell exists here already, as Kane claims (Saunders 20), but rather, that there is no
hell to be had in the first place. The thought that “There is no uncertainty” must be avoided at all
costs. Perhaps for this reason Kane made only one film, Skin. She states:
[The theatre] has always been the form I loved most because it’s live. There’s
always going to be a relationship between the material and the audience that you
don’t really get with a film . . . it’s a completely reciprocal relationship between
the play and the audience . . . if people [give theatre] . . . the level of analysis that
you listen to on the terraces [at a football game] . . . but they
don’t. (Benedict, “Disgusting Violence?”)

82

The lack of reciprocity, which she notes exists in the live-ness of theatre (see analysis above),
cannot occur for the audience and the film. The film goes on without the audience. It is not
influenced one way or another. The play, though, goes on without the audience too. The reader’s
relationship with the play goes on, as long as the process of reading continues. Material
documentation is not what makes the material, and, influence, as Judith Roof defines it, is
multidirectional, up to a point. As one consumes the work of art, and is made one with it, so too
does it linger and continue.
As much as Kane protests film’s limitations, other critics and playwrights, like David
Edgar, laud the play’s uncanny similarity to television. He states, that Kane, not unlike her
contemporaries, “operat[es] within the context of a British television drama . . . imprisoned
within the homogenizing constraints of genre. And the return to plays set in real rooms has been
matched by the equally dramatic re-emergence of plays set in real time” (State of Play 28). Edgar
denotes the uncomfortable nature of the live-ness of theatre, but, he also reveals a clear desire to
see the staging of cannibalism or rape as simulated, and not actual. The stage directions in
Blasted, further, imply something similar. They do not indicate for the first rape, of Cate by Ian,
that it is “simulated”; whereas, the second rape, of Ian by the Soldier, is. For Edgar, laying claim
to television as the indicator of a place of cultural origin-ation (no origin), to be put onto the
mediated and less-authentic stage, threatens the myth that there is no difference between the
simulated and represented, and perhaps the actual, if for only a brief moment. The stage
directions, on the other hand, still express a similar anxiety, as a reader to-be-performer is not
shown, precisely, what the difference is, exactly, between simulation and actuality. She may
infer, but she may not see “for sure.” But, to figure, “It must be simulation, and therefore, not
entirely ‘real’” is to dismiss the uncertainty, giving credence to that which is uncomfortable,

83

falling into the illusion of the material, “That is real, that is not,” still does not distinguish
between one “that” and the other “that.” The reader must choose a certainty that there is (alwaysalready) uncertainty to prevent the notion that there is no uncertainty vis-à-vis the certainty of the
taboo of cannibalism overlapping and denying its own (re)/presentation.
The Author’s Note enables yet another layer of cannibalism. It indicates that the “/”
“indicates a point of interruption in overlapping dialogue” (2). How is the performative to
function in this equation, from the reader’s perspective? This interruption, this penetration, is not
an act of splitting apart only. The violence gives way to “overlapping,” or a kind of simultaneity.
This mark is a means to unravel how the play treats materiality. At first glance, the material is
everything for Blasted. From the re-scrypting

39

of the language, materially on the page, to the

emphasis on the props of the play, materially, on the stage, is what “it all boils down to.” And if
“form is content,” as Kane suggests, and if she is dissatisfied with that form, meaning the
structures of the Western dramatic tradition, then how shall materiality serve?
In her analysis of Blasted, Alice Rayner suggests that the objects on stage, the props, are
“more than” what one sees. There is an excess of meaning, then, spilling out of the objects.
There is more object-ness in objects. She states, “The ‘more than’ means the thing is not
exhausted by whatever it may signify. The ‘more than’ paradoxically stands independent of
representation at the same time it might be representing” (189). The objects on stage become less
tangible by simply being on stage. “The more I see (excess), the more intangible it becomes.”
Further, through the notes on the page, the explosion of the set, and the consumption of the dead
baby in Blasted, the exchange between the reader (imagining herself as a performer seeing her as
an audience member see the performer perform) and the actor (seeing herself as a performer
39

A Derridean term meaning both “script” and “encrypt,” revealing the secreting nature of
language.
84

imagining herself perform outside of herself) between the text on the page and the text on stage,
between the immaterial and the material changes the nature of exchange.
The excess of meaning or signification occurs through an excess of the exchange that
occurs through signification, between the reader and the text, the performer and the text, the
reader and the performer, the object and the subject. If excited enough, though, this excess builds
and has no room for further expansion; expansion does not go on and on. Eventually, the
operational and the symbolic reach a critical stage of potentiality. “Eventually, I have to accept
that there is only so much the form of the play and the meaning of the play can do, or not.” The
“more than” gets treated from both a performing and reading experience as if that is all that there
is, “more.” And so, the reader and the performer accept that inability to capture the excess and
leave it, after that. Taboos can be considered as a representation of that excess. “If you go too far,
you’ll leave humanity in all its forms behind.”
When put on stage, however, that excess of exchange is knowable directly from only the
reader’s perspective. In Dismemberment in/Dismemberment of Drama, Craig Owens asks
whether or not the script is more powerful than the performance. He asks, “What if we consider
not only how language and theatrical conventions constrain performance, but are also necessary
to it? . . . These constraints enable performance . . . the non-intervention of the audience is as
essential as pretense is to the constitution of the performance qua performance” (128). What if
the audience does not, though, “remain impassive, alert but still” (124) in the auditorium, i.e., the
feeling that cannibalism is both a metaphor and an act, but not “really”? Revealed is the question,
“Is it a gun?” Answer: “Absolutely (not).” It is unclear how to accept the objecthood of the gun
on stage. “I want the object to be immaterial (both moot and non-existent).” Temporally
speaking, this re-scrpyting has the affect of desiring time to be objectified, rather than relative,

85

perspectival, or subjective. How does one resolve these issues? Simple. What did the Author
want? What is her “authoritative” word on the matter?
Part III: Cannibalism and the Author Function
One sees the baby, as object, being eaten; Ian challenges its materiality by eating it. The
baby as presented representation, its thingness, precludes or transcends its objectivity, as it too is
shown to be eaten, becoming subject-ively reconstituted. Ian exclaims at the opening of the play
that he has “shat in better places” (3) than the hotel in which he and Cate will be staying. Like
that shat, under the floorboards, flushed beneath the material structure, he is reconstituted with
the very object and thing-ness of the play, as he reconstitutes an object of the play with himself,
which allows for the paratextuality of the play to (un)veil itself to the reader. This collapse
reveals the truth that lies at the heart of the processes of mimesis. Taboos exist to ensure mimesis
continues. Presented representations of taboos, in particular cannibalism, reveal that the gap
between performance and the performative is only necessarily and perpetually in a constant state
of explosion and implosion so that the option to doubt, that is, to construct one’s own narrative
about self, via reading or performing, is sustained. Put on stage, cannibalism reveals this
dynamic. The more one sees in the play, the more it gets “boiled down” to an irreducible
affective response, which varies from individual to individual, but only in degree. The meaning
for the play is not revealed to splinter apart, entering into an exponentially transacting
occurrence. Alice Raynor claims that objects flow:
participate in multiple dimensions: in the signifying, narrative, and stylistic
fictions of a drama; in the material, aesthetic, and tangible reality of things
in themselves. But they also have a third function, which mediates these
aspects, in the degree to which, as staged objects, they present themselves

86

as representations. Staging, that is, creates the representation of representation
that isolates the fact of representation. (180-81)
The status of subject/objecthood changes when combining the processes at work via the notes
that “precede” the play, and the processes at work when one considers Ian’s cannibalization of
the dead baby under the floorboards at the end of Kane’s play. The former exposes how the
power of play on stage is at odds with the play on the page. The latter enacts that awareness of
signification to such a state of excitability that the representation of a presentation of a
representation on stage denies signification, meaning that the page and the stage reconstitute one
another. It is as if Ian fears his time will run out if he does not hurry up and use it. Paradoxically,
he does not get to if it is spent. The reader does. Signification, taken out of its context and time,
raises a fear in Ian: not only is an empty image that must be refilled left…he may not be able to
do it with meaningful thoughts or acts.
However, this very thing that raises fear within Ian is the very stuff of transubstantiation,
and that is scary. Annabelle Singer proposes that a theatrical outside/inside binary holds by
emphasizing the performance over the will of the author. Because the characters on stage are
treated as real,

40

in order to consider the individual audience member’s experience as not-her-

own, “What they experience is what we all experience; the world is but a dream; the stage is
more real than what’s outside the theatre.” Transubstantiation occurs:
The violence, the watched suffering [in Kane’s work], is not beautiful; it is a
warning. Experiencing Christ’s suffering may bring us closer to him, but
watching a human’s pain forces one to ask: What is the difference between
him and me? (157)
40

Notice how she posits the characters identities as in, as if their experience is real because the
spectator sees it.
87

The warning is that transubstantiation might just occur, but not between spectator and actor.
Transubstantiation occurs between the work on the page and the work on the stage, via the
41

reader. Mexican dramatist Alexandro Jodorowsky

vehemently opposes such an idea, and, not

unlike Bell, Jodorowsky in his “Vers l’éphémère panique” (1965) chastises any attempt to find
the permanent, ephemeral essence of some ill-defined concept of theatre and/or plays. He
indicates that a focus such as this leads to looking at the text, rather than at life, to looking at
form as opposed to spontaneity (Carlson 459).
It is just too terrifying to admit that there is an imaginary theatrical present/ce that is felt
sans either performer or audience member. The reader has access to transubstantiation, the end
game for what lies at the heart of mimesis, that is, cannibalism, which functions both this “( )”
way and this “/” way. The play enacts its own cannibalization and reveals that performance, like
language, whether or written or uttered, is an self-cannibalizing act. This tension goes through a
kind of sparagmotic process, as it collapses in on itself, which the reader considers: We want
there to be meaning found only through piercing, through violence, through splintering…the
individual pieces, as they relate to each other (like fucking atoms or particles). For once Kane’s
stage directions as in-direct performatives allows for the act of cannibalism to be seen as a
looped paratext: The taboo on stage the act of signification is an act, a process of performance.
The Author is Dead. All Hail the Author.
That act, then, as it relates to the Author, can be separated into two different kinds of
authenticating. On one level, there is the assurance that the experience of the play, live, shall be
more palpable and immediate than the reading of the play in solitude. As a reader, one is able to
“peek behind the curtain” and get a look at presumably how the play will be interpreted by the

41

Founder of théâtre panique with Fernando Arrabal
88

director and actors. The reader, though, is not “actually” the director, nor is she an actor on stage.
She may be in an existential or metaphorical sense, but she is not really producing the thing. She
is a voyeur; well, she is reminded of her voyeurism. So, despite any beliefs she may have about
creating the text via the performance of her production of meaning,

42

the real thing is the

material stage, material bodies, and material props. Thus, seeing it, being there with others to feel
the play as a collective—the notation for the notations (Kane’s Note) implies that something
unique and powerful does not transfer via the play on the page. Her notations suggest
signification the actors must convey and that the reader must interpret and imagine, but not quite
as well as what would have happened if she had seen the play.
Putting notations before the play is not unusual. Tennessee Williams’ stage directions for
Suddenly, Last Summer, for example, cannot be considered as stage “directions” in the strictest
sense. One understands how to have Mrs. Venable “enter[] with the assistance of a silverknobbed cane . . . wear[ing] a lavender lace dress, and over her withered bosom is pinned a
starfish of diamonds” (9). More unclear are the directions for the stage itself, which most
certainly is its own character in his play:
The set may be as unrealistic as the décor of a dramatic ballet . . . The
interior [of the house] is blended with a fantastic garden which is more
like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fernforests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to
skin. (9)
One can find these kinds of indicators in a myriad of other plays from a myriad of other dramatic
genres, and in this example, one cannot help but see the use of repetition and imagery as poetry

42

See Six Characters in Search of An Author.
89

in its own right. The purpose of Kane’s notation or Williams’ may be, as Kane’s note indicates
above, “to clarify meaning” (2). For her note above, it is to ensure that the use of the “[ ]” is
understood, i.e., that the signifier “[ ]” signifies in a particular way that is not to be mistaken for
another one:
IAN. Enjoy myself while I’m here.
(He inhales deeply on his cigarette and swallows the last of the gin
neat.)
[I’ll] Call that coon, get some more sent up.
(12)
It is as if a fantastical Kane is speaking “directly” to a fantastical actor, “Don’t say those words
in the ‘[ ]’s, ‘guy-who-shall-be- playing Ian’; that’s just for your own edification, to-beperformed, immaterially, and a knowledge that the reader now has as well.
The “( )” indicates that they (and that which is inside) are to be treated as “lines.” The
implication is that the actors, perhaps, may have a desire to rush through the actions. “Treat them
as importantly as you treat the lines you speak,” the words suggest. On another level, the author
herself is being authenticated by the sheer positioning of the “Editor’s Note” after it, yet “before”
the play. Yet, who wrote the “Author’s Note,” in lieu of this unnamed editor? One infers that this
note from the author is Kane’s. And it is. But as much as the note may be Kane’s,
The unnamed editor who penned the “Editor’s note,” which comes after the “Author’s
note,” echoes such a sentiment; it portends what it states: there is an “authentic” version of this
play “out there,” and here it is. You are holding the thing in your hands, not to be mistaken from
other versions you may have once held before. In other words, by sheer virtue of the “Editor’s
note” appearing second, it authorizes hierarchically, while collapsing the work with the author
simultaneously; the Author is god, and you are holding an extension of said author, in your

90

hands, right now. Very right now. The work cannot be misconstrued from earlier versions, from
before. It was “first reprinted in 2000”; in other words, smacks the unnamed editor, “please take
back the ‘re,’ readers, by focusing on the ‘first’ in the first part of my statement.” This is the
most original, authentic, authorized one, just so long as the reader forgets that the works and
performances from “before” are unauthorized, or at least, lesser versions. It is almost as if the
play is ashamed of itself, “Don’t look at those mistakes I made from before.”
The paradox lies in the desire to hierarchicalize via the conflation of the author with the
work, via the authorization of the work’s authenticity, via the work’s being in its materiality, via
the disavowal of earlier versions of the play. The implication is that the author and the work were
not . . . one, before. They are always-already in a state of cannibalism.

91

Chapter 3
David Greig’s San Diego: Cannibalism
(the Paratextual/the Paraleptical)
through the Aural
The character Laura in David Greig’s play San Diego cuts parts of herself off, sears them
in a hot pan, and then commands the character David to take and eat. Performatively speaking,
the vocal image of Laura that David’s subsequent smacking produces cannibalizes Laura. The
saying and the doing connect through the sound of cannibalism. Laura’s explicit commands that
the character David eat her, consummated in the sound of David’s smacking, challenges the
Austianian notion of the performative. The saying and the doing depend upon the hearing, which
distances the saying from the doing.

43

In order to condense the distance between actuality and

representation, the hearing splits the doing in such a way that it cannot be perceived. Derrida
denotes that “hearing-oneself-speak,”

44

precludes Laura being both speaker and hearer, both

that-to-be-consumed and consumer. She cannot enact transubstantiation with(out) such a gap on
stage.
David, though, allows for Laura’s transubstantiation, or in Derridean terms, the “hiatus”
or gap between speaking subject and the hearing subject to collapse in this “moment” or
45

“instant” (Augenblick) . In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,”

46

Derrida indicates that the

hearing challenges Husserl’s idea of a present presence; through the gap between Laura and
43

The hiatus must exist as the silently speaking to oneself requires one distance herself from
speaker and hearer. In Languages of the Unsayable, Derrida indicates that this process is one of
negation that denies the self (25).
44

Found in Speech and Phenomena, pp. 69-78. Note Derrida is playing off of Husserl’s idea that
lived experience (Erlebnis) has more to do with the interior than the exterior. Derrida wishes to
add exterior “detours” to the process.

45
46

Literally, in “the blink of an eye.”
from Languages of the Unsayable (1989), p. 25.
92

David comes constant reflection back upon their separate pasts and anticipatory, subsequent
looking forward to their separate futures. As the (dis)embodied voice transubstantiates Sebastian
in Suddenly, Last Summer, so does the sound in San Diego. Laura’s voice enacts, and David’s
sound consummates the cannibalism,
Because the play contains versions of the playwright David Greig, scholars contend he
stretches the boundaries of how the theatre “mediates” (Rodosthenous 3). “His personal voice,”
according to George Rodosthenous, “is characterized by the sensitive musicality of his text, an
individual sense of humour . . . Greig creates works of extreme visual beauty and emotional
directness in lyrical soundscapes” (3). The act of eating, i.e., seeing the eating, does not
necessarily confirm its having happened. The musicality of the text, the sound that transcends the
text, transforms David, transubstantiates Laura. Note that Rodosthenous contends the visual
divines from the lyrics: Smack, Smack, Smack. Also note that Rodosthenous does not stop with
an analysis of how Greig’s plays function, but he goes on to intertwine and collapse the works
with the writer; he reconstitutes the writer with the text—he makes an Author, an Author with
which Rodosthenous might eat himself.
The writer Greig, too, chooses to eat Sarah Kane in a similar fashion. Recall his “Editor’s
Note” that follows her “Author’s Note” and precedes the script of the play. The “Editor’s Note”
thus cannibalizes, i.e., it reconstitutes itself with the play Blasted, just as Rodosthenous’s
“Abstract” that precedes his interview with David Greig does. Quoting Greig, he writes:
Greig believes that theatre is a form of voyeurism, a ‘consensual exchange’
to ‘look at people and watch how they behave.’ In his work, the act of watching thus
acquires a new role surpassing the simple function of pleasure, and enabling the viewer to
engage further with the theatre’s mediation . . . voyeurism in theatre being re-read as a

93

new freedom of the gaze . . . an emancipation of restrained energy, testing the boundaries
of taboo. (3)
Greig’s personal voice is Laura’s voice is the sound of her cannibalization. Rodosthenous wants
to eat Greig, as Author/Work of Art. For him, the act is one of looking, which is odd since the
vocal imagery he articulates at the beginning of his abstract depends upon, happens “in” the
sound, which cannot be read.
Art historian Kathy O’Dell states this very thing. She claims that language and the body
are inseparable and manifest one another.

47

Inspired by Lacanian concepts, she uses

psychoanalysis to push beyond its limitations.

48

She states:

Lacan believes the body is “already written.” . . . Lacan opens the door
for individuals to seize control of what these moments entail. to take command
of the powers of representation through which the body is already and always
will be mediated, to marshall such effort toward doing one’s mediating
oneself. (55)
She, along with many art historians, considers body art as a means to see how inseparable the
body and language truly are. Amelia Jones states that body art exposes “[t]he representational
aspects of this

49

work” (33) as a play in and of itself, i.e., the body cannot exist without

representation. In her study of the performance artist Laurie Anderson’s work, Jones quotes
Anderson when she states, “Body art . . . shows that the body can never ‘be known purely’ as a
47

See Amelia Jones’ Body Art: Performing the Subject, pp. 33-4; and, see O’Dell’s “Fluxus
Feminus,” p. 55.

48
49

In this instance, she discusses the inherent masculinity embedded in language and the body.
She means her own, but, “this” refers to this study as well.
94

totalizable, fleshy whole that rests outside of the arena of the symbolic” (qtd in Owens, “The
Discourse of Others” 169). But what about sound? How might sound factor into the myth of the
totalizable, fleshy and knowable whole that is the body? What do we do with Laura’s selfcannibalizing acts?
I add that the word made sound made vocal image forces a reconsideration of the nature
of the mediation in theatre. The inexpressible word or the un-sayable sound transubstantiates the
poet through the work of art. “A poet’s work is his life, and vice versa,” according to Mrs.
Venable. The form of Sebastian is the content of his work, and vice versa, and if the “form is the
content” (Kane), then what of the form that cannot be categorized, or felt or proven to have been
felt? What of the inexpressible word, or the sound?
Part I: Paratextualizing the Author/Text
By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his
mouth . . . For he spoke, and it came to be . . . .
50
Psalm 33:6, 9
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . .
John 1:1, 14
The Book of St. John lays claim to the inseparable nature of flesh and language.
However, it is not transubstantiated until the first practice of the Last Supper, eating the flesh
made from I AM, the inexpressible Word(s). As unleavened bread once signified salvation by
being passed over, Jesus’s flesh now transubstantiates within the individual Christian, passing
over the Passover. Note how the book of John expresses a desire to collapse the divide between
the actual and the represented. David Greig’s San Diego similarly “desires” to cannibalistically
collapse the represented David in the play and the actual playwright, David Greig. and the actual

50

“Please, not The Bible.”
95

as well, but the cannibalism in San Diego is spoken to-be-actualized with David’s sounds of
smacking.
Laura’s commandments that David “take and eat” her flesh fulfills St. John’s wish:
Language and Body are indistinguishable. Laura wants to be inseparable from her cell mate,
David. Through a commandment, and all commandments are a performative, cannibalism
occurs. Cut and seared flesh for David to consume will reconstitute Laura within him. Both
Blasted and San Diego show that there is no difference between the written and the performed.
However, unlike Blasted, San Diego proposes that it is the disembodied voice that cannibalizes.
Reflexively, David Greig’s Editor’s Note that authorizes Kane’s text as the most
authentic, functions paratextually, cannibalistically as well because it is situated in between the
Author’s Note and the script of Blasted. The script and the Author’s Note, functioning as teeth,
chomp upon Greig’s note, and, if the body and language are the same, then Greig as well, not
just his note. He is both playwright and work of art in the 2001 edition of Blasted.
Greig’s note, situated as it is, cannibalizes itself. The body of the note manifests Greig’s
body. In San Diego, the body manifests via commanded cannibalism in San Diego, achieving
what the protagonist is after in Goethe’s Faust. At the end of the play, Faust decides to rewrite
the “Word” to “In the Beginning was the Deed.” Rather than seeing a dichotomy of inner and
outer life (watcher and actor, audience member and writer), or even inner and outer body, or
even subjective and objective experiences, Faust, like Laura, considers the possibility as to
whether or not there might be an in-between space (of in-activity) but a lack of spatiality
altogether. What if the body in space is not a body at all but a commandment embodied instead?
David Grieg’s San Diego equates commanded cannibalism to the paratextual, revealing that the
two function in not dissimilar ways.

96

Cannibalism in David Greig’s San Diego sheds light on the nature of how theatre
performs and offers such a third option that collapses representation with the actual. When Laura
insists that David eat a part of her flesh in the play, she commands, and he obeys. The
performative utterance, what Austin calls an “explicit performative,” of Laura’s full-fills itself by
doing the eating.
Like the title of this project, her utterance enacts Austin’s notion of the explicit
performative, i.e., that the saying or speaking is the doing. This project offers that a command
that must be followed, enacts an unspeakable, but tangible response that performs. As one reads,
one consumes the work. The doing becomes an act of performance through the reading. Hyperreflexively, the reader is now, if she was not beforehand, rather aware of being hailed.
Paradoxically, the reader knows what she must admit she does not know in order to engage with
the work. She must give herself over to the work. She must lose herself in it.
David, too, knows he must lose himself by putting Laura into himself. Laura’s selfpenetration, coupled with her commandment, forces David to relocate himself spatially. He is no
longer apart from Laura; he is a-part of her. Transubstantiation takes place. Further, the spoken
word in the play becomes both asynchronous and synchronous, which adds another layer of
cannibalization because commandments, by losing their Authors (who is doing the speaking
exactly?), become Authors in and of themselves. The Method of Laura’s substance being
reconstituted into David is the Matter of David’s redemption being constituted.
The fields of anthropology and linguistics have exhausted the concept of cannibalism as
it pertains to language acquisition, and ultimately to subject-formation, but no linguistic studies
have been done to suggest that language itself, functions cannibalistically.

51

Neither does this work portend such a scientific claim.
97

51

Representation

itself functions because of the spectre of taboos, especially cannibalism. Rodosthenous states that
through sound the “emancipation of restrained energy [we might] test[] the boundaries of taboo.”
It is not that representation might be transcended, per se, as Moshy contends, but rather, the
boundaries of taboo do not “really” exist, and never did in the first place. Cannibalism reveals
itself at the heart of representation, a heart that eats and reconstitutes itself.
Cannibalism’s legacy to that binary between Civilized Man (clean and proper), who uses
language, and the animal, who does not, who makes waste, is to remind the Civilized she is not
human after all, and the rem(a)inder is supposed to confirm the death, the other-ness of the other.
In that disavowal, though, of the waste or the material, is the disavowal of language as well.
Without the language, there would be no waste. And Language allegedly separates the beast
from beauty. In its inseparability vis-à-vis cannibalism, Laura, like all animals, comes to terms
with the fact that she will eventually die, as Language begins to break down in the wake of her
cannibalization, and this awareness she attempts to postpone with her occasional jests about her
health, and with the drugs:
LAURA. Bite my lip.
David bites her lip.
Oww.
DAVID. Sorry.
LAURA. It’s all right
Full of iron
Builds your bones.
Darkness.
End of Act Two.
.......................................

98

PILOT. They’ll help you here
They’ll help you out of it.
LAURA. Dad
I wish.
PILOT. They can, Laura. Drugs nowadays.
LAURA. Yeah, drugs.
PILOT. It will. Trust me. It will go away
You weren’t always like this
You were cheerful. You were a cheerful kid.
LAURA. Yeah. Before I fucked up.
PILOT. Before . . . before . . . what?
LAURA. I dunno
I fell down a big well.
PILOT. . . .

52

LAURA. . . .
...........................
PILOT. Then what? Tell me, please.
LAURA. I honestly don’t know
I . . . It . . .
It feels like I’m hungry all the time.
PILOT. Are you eating?
LAURA. Not hungry. Like I’m hungry.
She slumps.
I want to go home.
............................
COUNSELLOR. Why are you cutting yourself Laura?
52

This elliptical notation appears in the published text.
99

LAURA. I’m not cutting myself exactly.
COUNSELLOR. What then?
LAURA. I’m butchering myself.
COUNSELLOR. You’re certainly doing yourself harm.
LAURA. At least I’m eating.
COUNSELLOR. . . .
LAURA. I do cook the meat first. In fact, I want to be cured.
COUNSELLOR. Well, that’s good, Laura, that’s a start.
LAURA. In salt. Or maybe smoked.
Darkness
(45, 76-77)
Those boys in Cabeza de Lobo were sure hungry. Unlike those boys, the body does not
seem to fill Laura, especially as she excises it to-be-consumed/conjoined by/with David. It is the
sound that images the transubstantiation she is after, that is, to go home. Dr. Sugar administers a
drug to Catherine to get her to talk it out, which Sebastian, in a way, does: Laura is administered
drugs. It occurs offstage and apparently for quite some time. No one sees the drug going into the
vein. This passive way of administration paves the way for transubstantiation. The drug delays
the cannibalism, rather than speeds up the process of transubstantiation to occur. In that delay
can be briefly heard that smacking sound again, ghosting in the mind.
Scholars such as Rodosthenous contend that the majority of the play examines how the
alter-ego works, in particular, David Greig’s alter-egos, which display and manifest a variety of
talents, from highway construction to flying a plane to riding in one, these characters on stage
tell Rodosthenous that Greig expands the boundaries of taboos and civic conventions. Just like

100

Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” which asks which is the more savage, the European or the
Cannibal, this examination of Greig’s via the play forces a more present and forceful reappraisal
of the cannibal/civilized binary.
The binary does not break down because there is not one. The play’s form, further
provides a way to understand how cannibalism functions in paratextual and paraleptical ways.
The “Prologue,” for example, opens the play, and, not unlike the paratextuality, the cannibalizing
or reconstituting that Greig’s “Editor’s Note” enacts, San Diego’s “Prologue” paraleptically
opens the play, brushing aside the meat of the script as focused through the prism of “David
Greig’s” (the character’s) choral-like soliloquies at the beginning and ending. Further, it brackets
it with its counterpart, the closing “Epilogue.” The play becomes the thing, paratextualized,
cannibalized by paratextual notations:
Prologue
David Greig is sitting in an aeroplane seat.
DAVID GREIG. It’s the summer of 2000. I’m flying to San Diego, California.
It will be the first time I have ever visited the American continent . . . .

53

..............................................
DAVID. Thank God
Thank you God
Thank God.
The bump and screech of a plane landing.
The reverse thrust of engines.
The noise quiets.
Darkness.
In the darkness.
The Pilot’s voice.
PILOT. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to San Diego, we hope you’ve
53

Is it just me, or does that line echo Christopher Nolan’s Inception’s, “You’re sitting on a
train . . .”?
101

enjoyed flying with us today. The temperature outside is a rather
warm 82 degrees and the local time is 3.37 p.m.
(5, 115-16)
The Author at the end of the play reconstitutes himself into the David during the play,
and, if we are to believe Greig’s interviewers (biographers—author-izers), then all the characters
are interchangeable. Not just interchangeable, but re-member-able. It is the bracketing that both
reveals and enacts cannibalism; one can hear its aesthetic heartbeat, perhaps felt as a kind of
abjection. At the opening of Act Two, Scene Two, the stage directions indicate:
The Pilot sits at a table in the desert under an umbrella.
The Stewardess and Andrew are looking at him.
They are drinking from a bottle of whisky.
The Pilot is sitting in silent abjection.
(45)
Abjection, for Elizabeth Grosz, “is a sickness at one’s own body . . . the result of recognizing
that the body is more than, in excess of, the ‘clean and proper’” (emphases mine, 78). The “more
than” that I analyze in Chapter 2 takes on a different hue in lieu of Grosz’ (and Kristeva’s) notion
that there is more material to the body, rather than more meaning, per se. Teresa Brennan’s
History After Lacan (1993) suggests that the flesh and the word are nearly synonymous:
If . . . some part of the structure of language is based on an original form of
intra-uterine communication, then the question had to arise as to why language
works in ways that either facilitate or hinder connections. Presumably facilitating
connections are basic to the language of the flesh which has to be logical, in the
sense that one thing connects with another in a way that facilitates growth. This
suggests that logical thought, the connections made through words, is a kind
of mimesis of a hypothetical origin form of communication which was both
mental and physical. And if . . . the word can be turned in certain directions, a

102

turning hinged on its connection with a visual image, affects and motor activity,
then this direction will affect the ease with which connections are made. This
must be so, given that the image can lock a word inside hysteria (femininity).
In masculinity, the outward forceful projection of image and affects should
allow those words to flow more freely, but at the price of a divorce from
affective feeling. (emphases mine, 223-24)
If “the word made flesh,” as Brennan intimates, a literal, rather than a figurative
transubstantiated moment of commanded creation (see Austin) occurs. Such a move is one of
apathy, an always-already projection of an (non-simulated) image of God, either in his
(spoken/manifested) works or in his own manifestation as simultaneous father and son (other),
that divorces the subject from its Author. “God never cared, if he set us up to descend into a
demonic existence (Kristeva’s notion of language) absent the affective, but present the abject
body. In San Diego, Pious, an illegal immigrant living in San Diego, who presumably lives under
an expressway and does odd jobs to get by, tries to convince his new friend, who he has renamed
“Daniel,” that his (Daniel’s) mother will turn up (he has been looking for her his entire life)
because the worded map on the postcard she sent, its origin, will guide him to his destination.
She claims she has been a backup singer for Wings, which Daniel infers must be the way to find
her. Their questions about the topographicality, the materiality, the written/represented world, in
God’s mind, is a desire to put oneself outside of the duality of spirit and flesh, between
representation and action:
PIOUS. . . . .
He’s watching us
He’s in heaven watching us and . . .
Daniel.
..........................

103

DAVID. Tell me, Mother, in San Diego: do they suppose that we are
ants? That there are so many of us? Do they suppose that we are
dogs? That we love them? Do they suppose that we are cattle?
That they can eat our bodies?
[Pious and Daniel are still on stage, continuing their conversation]
PIOUS. You musn’t be angry, son.
DANIEL. Do you suppose that I came here to shovel their sand?
PIOUS. God will see to it.
DANIEL. When I was a boy in Jos
I lived nearby a white family
I walked into their garden one day
A boy, about my age
He was playing with a chemistry set
I went to see what he was doing
He threw blue acid in my face
I ran home
And my mother’s sister’s sister’s sister held me
And I asked her
Did the white boy maybe suppose that I was a thief?
And she said, ‘No, you little shit. The white boy supposed that you had
come to kill him.’
PIOUS. Everything is written in a map in God’s head.
DANIEL. I know. I know what’s written.
PIOUS. We can’t know.
DANIEL. I know. I know exactly where I’m going. I know
exactly.
It’s in a map in my head.
PIOUS. Son. You’re grieving.
DANIEL. I didn’t come to San Diego to bury my father.
PIOUS. Son.
You came to San Diego to find your mother.
Marie is on the couch.
Andrew is caressing her face.
104

She wakes up.
ANDREW. Did you see God?
MARIE. No.
ANDREW. Maybe it was just a passing thing and now he’s gone.
MARIE. No
He’ll come back.
(emphases mine, 83-4)
These exchanges model new exchanges for theatre. Cannibalism serves as a model to understand
how sonic materiality or tangible immateriality in San Diego reveals the nature of the material to
be more than materiality.
The “more than,” in other words can be found in the “excess,” or rather, the
reconstitution that occurs in Act Three, which combines and restructures, i.e., eats, pieces and
bits of Acts One and Two. The Prologue precedes Act One. Act Three opens with its own
Prologue, but it does not speak language; David Greig does not speak. The paratextual
monologue is silently marked:
PROLOGUE

54

Darkness.
In the darkness, music: “Band on the Run,” Wings, at
the instrumental break.
A sudden burst of flame.
Innocent’s body lies on a pyre of flames.
Daniel and Pious stand before it. On the ground in the
dust, the melon, cigarette lighter, the string and the knife.
The music is coming from a tiny flatbed tape recorder
playing an old cassette.
Laura is lying in a hospital bed.
David is sitting on the bed, wearing a hospital gown.
They are holding hands.
Darkness.

54

Note that the “Prologue” earlier is in Lower-case; whereas, the “PROLOGUE” is in ALL-CAPS.
105

The mark of cannibalism, heard.
Part II: From Kane to Greig: The Mark of Cannibalism and Sonic Materiality
Sarah Kane’s stage directions in Blasted not only perform cannibalism on the page for the
reader, but also reveal that the performative aspects of language are cannibalistic in nature. Since
the 2001 edition is the definitive text to emulate, and the text lacks a definitive “point of
interruption [that signifies] overlapping dialogue” (2), all that is left is a search for the
interruption that never comes. Rendering only overlap to parse through, eventually, slows the
process of signification because of the rab/pid act of looking that first occurs. The reader looks
so much so that she disregards the search and disavows interruption in its entirety. “The visual
image is what the crowd is after. The set explodes. The dead baby is eaten. A rape in Leeds is a
metaphor for Civil War.” The words are disregarded in lieu of the image, and ironically enough,
the stage directions enact this anxiety by recoding what the signifiers have conventionally been
understood to mean. The reading cannot find the interruption. The dialogue, theoretically
speaking, is all overlapping in the absence of the “/”. The reader can do what the actor cannot.
The “/” can be enacted, but it cannot be inserted into the text. The lines do not interrupt. They
overlap and overlap and overlap, eating the line that came before, consuming the line that comes
after. The lack of a “/” becomes more influential than if there was one there. Regardless of
whether or not one exists in the “original” text, Kane herself, along with Greig, insist that this is
the authorized version. It trumps all others that are or may have once been floating about out
there. The stage directions enact the thing it simulates on stage, on the page.

106

In San Diego, Laura, who may be an alter-ego of David (the persona of David Greig the
playwright),

55

teases and then commands David to eat her flesh. Word becomes Spirit:
DAVID. I’m hungry.
Andrew enters
ANDREW. Love? You’ve been praying all night, love
Come to bed
. . .56
Love, you have to eat
You have to sleep
You have to . . .
...
Come on, love.
LAURA. How do you want me?
DAVID. In me.
LAURA. Tell.
DAVID. I want to feel full up again
Like before.
LAURA. Do you want me tender?
DAVID. Yeah.
LAURA. Do you want me wrapped in foil and butter
And baked
Slowly, slowly, so all my juices keep their flavor.
DAVID. Sounds good, yeah.
.............................
LAURA. Or do you want me flash-fried over a hot flame
Hissing and spitting

55

The play suggests this connection, as projected words on a screen announce the play is
Greig’s and that he, the author, has decided to drop in on the performance as fictional/real
figure.
56
Part of the text.
107

Herbs rubbed into my skin, rare and red on the inside.
DAVID. God yeah.
.........................
LAURA. Or d’you want me marinaded in wine
Paper-thin strips of me
Soaked in delicious booze.
DAVID. Bloody hell.
LAURA. Or stewed with chili
So I burn your mouth off.
DAVID. Fuck
I just want what you want.
LAURA. I want you to eat me raw.
DAVID. God. You sure?
LAURA. You scared to?
DAVID. No.
LAURA. Go on then.
DAVID. Just take a bite?
LAURA. Taste first
Lick first.
DAVID. . . .

57

LAURA. Go on.
David gets into bed with Laura. He crawls between her legs.
ANDREW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seriously. I don’t think God would mind . . .
Would he
Could he mind? If we . . . expressed our . . .
He made us sexual beings after all
57

Part of the text.
108

We have to conjoin, in union, blessed union, isn’t it?
And we conjoin . . . in a holy way, and . . .
That’s a form of worship isn’t it?
It’s a form of prayer in a way
Isn’t it?
When two people lose themselves in each other’s
bodies its’ sacred
Isn’t it?
I think, in fact, I know that God, if and when he
makes himself available to you in revelation, I know that
he, if you asked him would make it very plain to you by
sign or symbol that he wanted you to make love
With me
Now
...
Besides, love
You do look fantastic . . .
Laura screams.
Marie falls sideways. In a faint.
Andrew approaches her.
David emerges from the bed.
He swallows something.
Laura kisses him.
They hold each other.
(79-82)
Getting laid, getting eaten: The two get conflated here, both of which are to stand in for a desire
to achieve transubstantiation. In The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli indicates that
such an experience, i.e,. transubstantiation, is possible, but not through sound. He states, “[F]or
modern poetry, the Word is not sound-sense, but idea-thing; in its vision the Word is not spirit
which became flesh, but flesh which became spirit” (197). Poggioli calls this process the
“metaphysics of the metaphor” (196), or what he claims that one finds in T.S. Eliot’s works, a
“transhumanizing tendency,” i.e., “man is a thing we must transcend” (182). San Diego suggests
that unheard sound-sans-sense via the text on the page. I can’t really hear the sounds when I read
the play. Like Innocent, I “can’t read the writing” (61).

109

Poggioli quotes Louis Aragon, the twentieth-century French poet and novelist, who
states, “Life is language; writing is a completely different one. Their grammars are not mutually
interchangeable” (197). The “myth of pure poetry” (Poggioli 199) enacts in San Diego. Poggioli
claims that this poetry is “ideally represented by Mallarmé” (199), but might the sound
cannibalize the language on the page?
Still in Scene 2, the play shifts to another moment with other characters with little
transition. Immediately following these stage directions, Pious and Daniel begin talking. Such an
abrupt shift: from Laura asking (and then telling) David to eat her in a variety of preparations; to
David presumably eating Laura (not sexually-?), and then swallowing; to a long monologue
about the nature of God and love, while simulated cannibalism is occurring on stage . . . to this
conversation gives the reader/audience a kind of aesthetic schizophrenic experience, not unlike
in Blasted (See Chapter 4). The difference is the sound. “He swallows something” is heard and
visualized in a way that one cannot see or necessarily read on stage or on the page.
One does not see the visual excess of simulated cannibalism one finds in Blasted in
David Greig’s San Diego. Instead, the play asks how to (un)map the body sonorously. The
cannibalism in Greig’s play exhibits more materiality through the materiality the accompanying
(or not) sonic resonances. In the wake of Laura’s commandment to, and David’s later confession
of cannibalism, the vocal image is more prescient and present for the reader. Liz Mills defines
such a concept as a “vocal image,” which is “the generating of or presence of vocalized sound
intended to form an acoustic image either linked to language or independent of language” (web).
When Laura asks David if he would like a taste of her flesh, it is the smacking and chewing that
materializes the act, not the simulation of it. Mills further claims it is the vocal image that can
affect the actor’s conventional conceptualizations of performance space via the linguistic. Mills

110

sees the vocal image as a means to a kind of posthuman theatre, a theatre that produces an
independence from language, through language. The materialization, though, of the flesh through
sound is as illusory and momentary as it is reconstituted, because it is reconstituted, absent but
present. The concept of the sonorous image is transubstantiation, not materialization. Ian’s calls
for someone to answer him manifest into material needs which are visually simulated; in San
Diego, Laura’s pawing at David to eat her flesh manifests into their stichomythic exchange
which aurally materializes the act.
San Diego reconstitutes the voice and the word. Julia Kristeva provides a brief opening
for such an experience to occur. Borrowing from Plato’s Timaeus (his account of the creation of
the world), Kristeva uses the term chora, or sound play, as a term to refer to a space wherein
“natural” language can provide “for different modes of articulation of the semiotic and the
symbolic” (Revolution in Poetic Language 24) experience, specifically in a performance space.
For Kristeva, the chora is a “third space,” or an “in-between” space, that is not devoid of the
material.58 She states:
Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing
remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere,
cadaver. (PH 2)
For Plato, this (prelinguistic) space is the place where Being, in its ideal, clean, non-human state,
originates. The wastes that drop out of the body are a reminder, for Kristeva, that such a desire
for the Ideal (body) is a desire to disavow boundaries and limitations of our physicality, of death.
The subject, for Kristeva, cannot be removed in order to understand meaning sans the

58

Plato does not believe that this is so.
111

biological.

59

Greig’s San Diego uses the chora in order to suggest that this in-between space can

become less fluid and more static than one might like to consider.

60

The illusion of limitations,

of physicality hides the notion that we are already dead.
The chora provides the basis for theorizing an intertextuality of voice that references a
dimension of sound play already evident in the theatre and performance practices of
experimental theatre. The chora is that stage of psychosexual development wherein the ability to
distinguish one’s “own” desire from another’s has not yet been acquired (Covino 16-18). Plato
uses the term to refer to what Zeyl translates as “invisible” or a “characterless” thing (Covino 1618). For Kristeva, this is not the case because one ultimately cannot escape the body. In this third
space, ownership is not yet acquired, of one’s self, of one’s body. This is a stage of the
prelinguistic, prior to moving into what Kristeva calls the “thetic phase.” It is here that one
moves from the semiotic—the fluid movement of sounds and language without referents—to the
symbolic—the naming of things, which is the means to communicate. Since Kristeva does not
believe the two are mutually exclusive, she denotes one overlap between the semiotic and the
symbolic is a child’s designation of a dog barking, “Woof-Woof.” The signifier for the child and
the sound the dog makes are the same.

61

The intertextuality of voice, the object-status of voice is an idea that pulls the
exponentiality of meaning back in on itself. At the opening of Scene 2, Laura’s offering of her

59

Also a Hegelian notion, i.e., that one can get beyond the subject and understand history
outside of the subject. Language, in this model, can be purged of this influence, seeing only, in
the end, pure logic.

60

Please see Amending the Abject: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture (2004) for
further reading.

61

This information has been distilled from a number of sources. Please see: Julia Kristeva’s La
Révolution du Langage Poétique (1974); Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1984)
112

body, her flesh, for David to eat has little to do with the act of cannibalism and more with the
way her requests are heard, which suggests that materiality is not only intangible but also defies
representation to a degree.
Through the excesses of the material comes the shattering of the delusion of the material
(alone). In his collection entitled Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in
Contemporary Drama, Stanton Garner indicates in the introduction that:
the dramatic text . . . is a valuable means of access to the stage in particular to
phenomenological configurations . . . the written text is both a blueprint for
performance and a specific discipline of body, stage, and eye. In its directions for
setting, speech, and action, the dramatic text coordinates the elements of
performance and puts them into play; reading ‘through’ this text, one can seize
these elements in specific and complex relationships. (5-6)
This assessment of the dramatic text puts it into the position of an “origin,” but an originating,
auth(or)entic(ating) point that does not necessarily need to be followed, per se.
To echo Chapter One while evoking the futile search for the author, Tennessee Williams’
“Author’s Note” to the 1973 edition of The Glass Menagerie has the 1948 publication’s
“Author’s Note,” which is Williams’ reflection upon the sudden “Catastrophe of Success”

62

that

the play afforded him. More importantly, he indicates that a director in one production of the
play removed the origin-al screen that Williams had envisioned up-stage and center, with images
projected onto them, such as the words, “Magic Lantern.” Instead, Williams asserts, the director
chose more of a mythical tone, a tone which Laurette Taylor amplified with an echoed legacy of
her own, now, mythical performances of Amanda Wingfield. It was “not a regret” that Williams

62

This first appeared in the New York Times in 1947 opening of The Glass Menagerie.
113

had, taking out the prop. Further, the Dramatists Play Service includes in the 1973 edition a
“Publisher’s Note” indicating not to worry (to an implied reader or performer) over things like
the alleyway and fire escape, the use of lighting and the “specific music cues,” or being unable to
fit all the music Laura plays “onto three records.” If a director feels, the Publisher states, that
none or only some of the original stage directions do not work for a specific staging of the play,
then by all means, disregard them. If the use of “two scrims” is too much, then dump it. If the use
of fades and other lighting techniques are misleading, then use the “traditional curtain drop”
instead. But . . . at the very end of the “Publisher’s Note,” the “Publisher and the Author highly
recommend” that you do follow the original stage directions, if they are to be actually potentially
realized (see “Imaginary Theatrical Present”).
In both instances, performance is emphasized as: A) The fruition of the material text,
which is the goal, i.e., the performance is the real thing; and, B) That the material aspects of the
performance, especially the body, always-already adhere to a “discipline” that is not beholden to
the written text, but instead, is trying to transcend it. One cannot transcend the material because
the representation of the material is where representation “ends,” or rather, eats itself. The body
cannot be a representation. In other words, the body is as much a text as Sebastian’s Poem of
Summer. If the body is already a representation, and it is cannibalized on stage, but I hear it when
I read it, what does one do with those studies of theatre that are phenomenological in nature?
Garner asserts that studying drama through a phenomenological lens can “illuminate the
possible actuality already posited by the dramatic text” (7), which indicates that the playtext, too,
has a phenomenal element to it. There is no difference between the text on the page and the text
on the stage (5). What is lost in the process, however, is the ability to unmark the body, which

114

San Diego does allow to happen. Merleau-Ponty indicates that the body is more than just the
body:
Experience discloses beneath objective space, in which the body eventually
finds its place, a primitive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer
covering and which merges with the body’s very being. To be a body, is to be
tied to a certain world. Our body is not primarily in space: it is of it. (148)

Is there no space for the (un)heard sounds? Is it possible to loosen the cont(r)act of space in this
dichotomous model; is there a way of conceiving of the processes of representation of/back to
the (non/hyper)body in a fourth or even a fifth “space,” rather than a third, “in-between”?
The question of liminal spaces is as much a question about the boundaries of language, as
it represents the body, as it is about the body. Does sound actually materialize? The use of the
term “material,” in this application, implies that something can be seen or touched. What does
the actual mean exactly, in this sense? The actual heart of representation beats to the rhythm of
cannibalism. To use a rough analogy to show how this concept is not an analogy, traditional
African music often brings out the origins of a sound with asynchronous, dissonant, or
supplemental music. The supplement is the matter at hand, and in Daniel’s case, his search for
his Wings-backup-singing mother fails because he continues to use the paternal, “natural”
language that will maintain binaries.
According to Julia Kristeva, in “natural” language, there is no maternal. Daniel’s search
is a quest through language itself. His search lingers over the definition of metaphysical, abstract
concepts about God and the role of the mother than actually finding his mother. There is no
maternal in “natural” language, according to Kristeva. So, he will never find her there. Daniel’s
search for a mother is a search for a map that works, i.e., the matrix. He claims that he knows
115

where he is headed, and that that knowledge is God’s also, i.e., he knows God’s mind. Yet,
“God,” inasmuch as he is indefinable (“I AM”), is also as equally masculine (definable). Daniel
suggests he has found a different map, of sorts, to guide him. If it is not in “natural” language
that he shall experience something other than the masculine, and this is a non-representational
map, then following Kristeva’s suggestions above, then it must be the maternal that is his map.
Daniel is not just Daniel, though. The List of Characters indicates “Daniel/Grey Lag, an
illegal immigrant” (3). Colin Thomas’ review of San Diego when it came to Studio 58 in
Vancouver in 2005 indicates that although actors play multiple characters, or, that relationships
among characters may be opaque, Greig cannot help but include exposition in his work:
by explaining everything, Greig makes it look like he doesn’t trust his audience.
He also plays shallow tricks. He rifts on images, including one of orphaned
goslings. A young, emotionally abandoned character is nicknamed Graylag after
a kind of goose, for instance, but we already have flight and loss of
identity. (from the Georgia Straight)
The “/” in Greig’s play indicates duality. In Kane’s Blasted, it indicates a “point of interruption,”
that is, an overlap. Duality implies dichotomy. Overlap implies part of something is covered, but
something else is uncovered. One is a piercing, a violence. In the latter example, interrupting is
not. Daniel stabs David Greig to death. But, in the origin-al production at the Royal Lyceum
Theatre in 2003 (which Greig co-directed), “this ersatz Greig [afterwards] continues to look
down on the proceedings, as though from a cabin window, in a looping video projection”
(Cavendish). It is not that he is not dead, but rather, that his death signals a falsehood. It is as if
the reviewer, Dominic Cavendish, finds this artificial David less “authentic.” Even the first actor

116

63

to play, David, Billy Boyd , was worried about getting the play, and by extension, getting
‘David’ “right”: “I’m an actor playing David Greig in a David Greig play about San Diego, but
it’s a made up San Diego that’s in David’s head” (theatreSCOTLAND). “Made up” emphasizes
this actor’s idea that there is a real and a fictional San Diego, just as there must be a real and a
fictional “David Greig.” Several reviews, however, do not treat place the same way that it treats
what is real. Colin Thomas states:
Craig Hall’s set [for the Vancouver 2005 production is a] foreshadowed a bit of
freeway leading to a rectangular opening that continually varies in size . . . [it] is a
lyrical piece of sculpture. In its articulate combination of airplane roars and spacy
keyboard tinkling, Nick Powell’s sound design is similarly hip and
melancholy. (from the Georgia Straight)
Place seems to have a kind of overlapping quality that is and is not representational;
phenomenology must be left behind. Character, for Thomas, seems to adhere to rules of
representation; whereas, the set, not so much. The moving and tinkling, “hip and melancholy”
experience “gets a pass.” They work, somehow, but the “/” designation for a dual persona,
“Daniel/Gray Lag,” seems like overkill, “I get it; but give me more moving sets and colors and
sounds . . . those aren’t ‘boring.’”
“Boring” signifies a distance between the set and the bodies on set can be analogized in
the distance between seeing and reading. The set, like seeing, is valued at the expense of the
music, the reading. For Barthes the actor in certain plays, and the reader of all plays, are afforded
an extraordinary, structuring power. It is her (actor/reader) ability to render the immateriality of

63

Pippin in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.
117

the stage (music) in tangible ways that transcends the Grecian bind of theatre to geometry (an
auditorium, for example). Barthes states:
The theatre is precisely that practice which calculates the place of things
as they are observed . . . The stage is the line which stands across the path of
the optic pencil, tracing at once the point at which it is brought to a stop and . . .
the threshold of its ramification. Thus is founded—against music (against the
text)—representation. (69)
The actor has opportunities

64

to challenge representation on stage, just as the reader has the

power to challenge representation on the page. In Barthes’ “Musica Practica,” he goes on to ask
how this challenge might occur by designating two kinds of music: the kind one listens to
(passivity) and the kind that one plays (activity). According to Barthes, reading and performing
are “two totally different arts” (). One can find that “the same composer can be minor if you
listen to him, tremendous if you play him” (149). And for Barthes, to play is to read, is to
compose. He states:
To compose . . . is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write. The
modern location for music is not the concert hall, but the stage on which the
musicians pass . . . It is we who are playing, though still it is true by proxy; but
one can imagine the concert—later on?—as exclusively a workshop, from which
nothing spills over . . . no ‘soul’ and where all the musical art is absorbed in a
praxis with no remainder. Such is the utopia that a certain Beethoven, who is not
played, teaches . . . .” (153-54)

64

In this essay, Barthes provides a narrow account of these opportunities, such as, in Brechtian
distanciation.
118

There must be something about music that transcends the notes on the page. Play accesses this
excess that spills back into itself (no remainder). Doing. This intangible but present cannibalisitic
entity that is a process is not completely untouchable either. For Barthes, this inexact locality of
the operational/representational is what fascinates him, and enables for a kind of touching:
[P]erhaps [ ] Beethoven’s music has in it something inaudible (something
for which hearing is not the exact locality) . . . Beethoven’s [material condition
of] deafness designates the lack wherein resides all signification; it appeals
to a music that is not abstract or inward, but that is endowed . . . with a
tangible intelligibility, with the intelligible as tangible. Such a category is
truly revolutionary, unthinkable in terms of the old aesthetics . . . [it] can no
longer be either performance or hearing, but reading . . . reading this Beethoven
is to operate his music . . . into an unknown praxis. (152, 153)
In the excesses of activities vis-à-vis the personas indicated by the “/” is a duality that is shown
simultaneously. For example, the reader can operate “Daniel/Gray Lag” because reading
provides access to the inaudible sound that accompanies “seeing” the tag,” Daniel/Gray Lag.”
The audience member does not have this ability to hear the inaudible mark or name,
cannibalizing itself.
Reading is not just seeing. It is hearing the inaudible that dematerializes and reconstitutes
the materiality of the script. The audience member cannot hear the simultaneity of that duality.
For the audience member, this particular layer of cannibalism is either inaccessible or perhaps a
passive experience. The audience member does not have access to this because the audience
member does not have access to the “/” or the mark that denotes duality. The excess of site/sight
(places in the play/ “seeing” cannibalism on stage) pulls the distance between the actual and the

119

representational closer together because the space outside the theatre space “with no other
audience than its participants (that is, with all the risk of theatre, all temptation of hysteria

65

removed)” (149), exists more materially in its absence for the reader. There is still hysteria and
the potential for danger in reading a script to-be-performed.
By sheer virtue of being in a seeing place, the space of the theatre, lends too much
enticement to enable a cannibalistic mindset. One must be alone with/in her body in order to be
able to access the materiality that Barthes is talking about. For example, Barthes claims
Beethoven’s deafness provides more materiality to leak through the reading, rather than the
hearing, of the music. The same holds for the character “Daniel/Gray Lag,” i.e., the reader has
access to the “/”.

66

There is a paradox at work here.

On the one hand, the body DOES the marking. This is the new power of the reader; it is
“as though the body were hearing—and not the ‘soul’; a music which is not played ‘by heart’:
seated at the keyboard or the music stand, the body controls . . . having itself to transcribe what it
reads, making sound and meaning, the body as inscriber” (Barthes 149). A staged environment
marks the body. On the other hand, then, it is the body that UN-does the marking that has been
done to it before the play ever began. Herein is where Barthes’ desire for the ideal presentation

65

Consider The Bacchae, most especially, Pentheus’s fear that if left alone, the maternal, the
female will overpower and rip apart the male, i.e., the maleness of Western culture (following
Kristeva’s thinking) might just actually destabilize in the wake of a newly female engendered
speak.

66

Counter: One might consider Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls as an example of the inverse of this
premise: Although I can read the “/” in her play, knowing that they signify one actor
interrupting another, I do not truly “get the whole performance” without hearing the actors
actually say the lines over the other. Such a claim of realization in “actual” space denies the
reading experience that constructs an “imaginary” one.
120

of meaning, on stage, falters, for this cannot completely occur because the difference in natures
of the text and the nature of the corporeal bodies on stage collapses in the wake of cannibalism.
Laura’s marked body on the page might give a true, real essence for Barthes; yet, this
goal cannot be attained, but only glimpsed at from the side, awry. When the character(s)
“Daniel/Gray Lag” is(are) on stage, the audience cannot see that he is one or the other because he
switches between the two, or at least, the reader knows that one is being played “independently”
of the other except for when a character, like Pious, indicates that Daniel shall have a new name.
The ability for the stage to be a-representational but the characters not to be indicates that there is
a need to see the differences between the actual and represented…in the excess of site/sight…of
characters, but not for place. It is as if place is a given.
The reviews of San Diego express an anxiety about the way the bodies of the characters
are (un)marked, a fear of the word and the body becoming interchangeable. In Image—Music—
Text, Barthes again contends that the flesh and the body are separable. The material body stands
in excess of the stage directions of the text in production, whether acting or reading, but not
seeing. Because Laura commands (performative) that David eat her flesh, the audience is
pacified. “It’s OK. Weird, but OK.” Critical thinking is not occurring here because there is no
distance; one is able to “identify” with the characters, especially with Marie, and one does so
through the word games that stop functioning as words and start to function as effects. These
effects, for the audience, though, are un-real. “He didn’t really eat her.” This ability to doubt that
someone has been eaten “up there” reveals an unfaltering need for taboos to serve as reminders
that signification goes on, indefinitely, subjectively. Cannibalism reconstitutes performance and
the performative to recodify signification in the theatre.

121

Part III: The body is not visible: No Representation without Transubstantiation
The body is not the site of signification. San Diego’s use of cannibalism inverts Barthes’
suggestion in S/Z that there is not one fixed signified linked to a myriad of signifiers. Can there
be a fixed signified, in taboo, that has multiple signifiers that are aural, aurally read (internally)?
The affect of the paternal, masculine nature of language can be understood as a cannibalistic
enterprise, wherein the duality of/in space/time is lost in the wake of the conflation of subject
and object via the sonic materiality of cannibalism in San Diego. The masculine nature of
language cannibalizes itself, and in the theatre, one combines these two reading experiences.
First, there are several “David’s” in the play. The only way to see these figures as
actually (in in so far as representation goes) interchangeable is to read the David’s, not see them.
Any myriad of techniques might get the idea across to an audience, but the effect will be lost.
Even by giving all the “David’s” a William Shatner mask, for example, the absolute, equivalent
David for David, cannot be attained. A true one-to-one exchange does not occur in the reading
either. However, one can understand how the use of the trope of cannibalism can collapse the
various figures into one another. First, note the list of characters:

Characters

David Greig, the author
..................
David, a patient
David A, someone who works in conceptual consultancy
David B, someone who works in conceptual consultancy
David C, someone who works in conceptual consultancy
(3)
122

The play, not unlike Blasted, conflates actual and represented states of being and statuses of
objects/subjects. As Graham Saunders contends about Kane’s Blasted, this play provides a
means to enact a “new model of place and identity from the devastation” (3). David Greig’s
“Introduction” to Kane’s works not dissimilarly suggests:
Her simple premise [is] that there was a connection between a rape in a Leeds
hotel room and the hellish devastation of civil war . . . It is as though the act of
rape, which blasts the inner world of both victim and perpetrator has also
destroyed the world outside the room. The play’s form begins to fragment. Its
structure seems to buckle under the weight of the violent forces it has unleashed.
The time frame condenses; a scene that begins in Spring ends in Summer. The
dialogue erodes, becoming sparse. The scenes are presented in smaller and
smaller fragments. (emphases mine, x)
The scenes, like the David’s, collide and reconstitute each other. Each scene is shorter than the
last. Greig’s use of the terms “weight” with “condense,” however, suggests material or tangible
kinds of “forces” will condense, rather than time. The material and the temporal, too, reconstitute
one another “under the weight” of the play’s fracturing and reconstituting.
Preamble to The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria vis-à-vis San Diego
In a review of Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
(see Chapter 4) being played at the Trap Door Theatre in Chicago, Lucia Mauro states:
What makes this hellish charade [in the play] so horrifying is that both
men eventually become interchangeable. One morphs into the other—no
matter how many costumes they don—underscoring one’s capacity for the
vilest acts of self-preservation in the guise of humankind’s well being
123

(which usually leads to self-destruction). (chicagotheatre.com)
The charade, or what reviewer Clive Barnes similarly characterizes in his assessment of the
play’s 1976 NYC premiere, as “almost impossibly poetic . . . a dazzling madness of words
scattered across the sky like diamanté stars . . . ,” language can be seen, and not just because
Greig has flashing words on a scrim in the background. Barnes refers to the dialogue, the
language the characters speak, or do not. Through this madness, Barnes suggests that “we all
have a little of each [person] in us . . . Arrabal dreams in the images of reality” (Barnes).
Through the use of word games, riddles, and the interchangeability of characters, the “play,”
according to Barnes, “play[s] God”

67

(Barnes). As Sebastian desires for a restructuring of the

nature by which the material accesses the “soul,” i.e., to become God through Art, so too does
Barnes wish to restructure the nature by which the play functions (as does Greig) by showing
that the work plays at being God, concealing and revealing the hidden creator or Author. The
critic as spectator wishes to become Art by consuming its meaning (the review) and joining,
then, with the creator. “Arrabal dreams in the images of reality.” The first time Barnes saw the
play in the 1971 London premiere, he abhorred it, and indicates as much in his 1976 review.
What changes from the first time to the second? Barnes cannot explain it. “Was it the set?” he
asks. No.

68

“The acting?” No.

69

“What was it?” In the end, he cannot explain the difference in

his reactions other than he had time for the play to work on his subconscious.

67

Barnes points out in this same review that when he first saw the play at its London premiere
in 1971, he lambasted it, and he is not certain why.

68

Tom O’Horgan, of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar Broadway fame, staged the 1977
production. Bill Stabile built a set with eight platforms.

69

Anthony Hopkins was in the 1971 production. Ron Perlman in 1977. Not that either of these
gentlemen have given less-than-tolerable performances, on the whole, much of their stage
work is met with above-average reception.
124

In San Diego, there is the moving image (the actor) of the dead (but not/but is-not)
version of the playwright, crouching over the other actors. There is the banner projecting onto
the scrim, announcing Greig’s authorship of the work, presumably. There is the cannibalism,
Laura offering David some of her sweet breads, and David, obliging. The site/sight of the
cannibalism, however, is not located on the stage. For Elaine Scarry, such a dislocation makes
sense. Pain is negating. Pain strips one of representation; unable to use language for expression,
one’s cries become guttural, unintelligible (The Body in Pain). Cannibalism is not only pain, but
the representation of all that is beyond language, simultaneously. After-the-fact, Scarry suggests,
pain can be represented in ways that do allow for the inner experience to be distilled out for
shared, consumed experience. This consumption of cannibalism, though, works differently. The
dislocation of self from world that Scarry articulates can be understood as Barthes understands
the dislocation of a play from its own stage directions. It is as if theatre is having some kind of
existential crisis almost.
In Barthes’ assessment of “Baudelaire’s Theater,” he intimates that it fails (26) because
its stages (stage directions) dishonestly believes in its own “precooked” nature (26), i.e., the
works behave as if they came from nowhere and were always-already seamless and whole. There
is just too much emotion, distraction, spectacle, or passivity in the conventional theatre for
transformation to occur. Critical awareness, the a/effect of alienation (of Episierung) through
Brecht’s Mother Courage, for example, can show that art is constantly shifting in meaning
through the reflection that might occur

70

(74-75). Baudelaire’s work shows that “the actor’s

70

“The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism” (1956) from Critical Essays. Briefly, Brecht suggests that
through distancing (non-identificatory dramatic art), one can see the seams in the art object.
She can make meaning for the text because she sees its fabrication and can subsequently
manipulate the creases.
125

disturbing corporeality” is evoked, but evoked in an imbedded, clandestine way (27). Barthes
sees a tension between the body, the flesh, and the text.
The site/sight on stage is a displacement of corporeality. The seeing functions aurally as
much as it does visually. The limitations of the body exist because of the reminders of its
limitations through cannibalism, which, in Greig’s play, crystallizes the idea that not only is the
inside and outside interchangeable, but also that they are equally dissolvable, consumable, and
non-existent, in the end.
Pious gives Daniel a nickname: “Gray Lag.” Pious speaks and renders a new (masculine)
marker of identity/subjectivity for Daniel, a fatherly gest that is supposed to make up for a lack
that is not there in the first place, at least, not anymore. Pious plays the role of father in order to
speak the condition of his promised-to-be (for himself to himself and to the audience/reader by
extension) son. The use of rhetorical devices, coupled with sounds of airplanes in the opening of
San Diego is not that dissimilar from the opening of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria.
(/)
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
Airplane noises. Like a trapped and frightened animal, the ARCHITECT looks for a refuge. He
runs in all directions, digs in the ground, starts to run again, and finally buries his head in the
sand. Explosion. A bright flash of flames. Trembling with fear the ARCHITECT, his face against
the sand, puts his fingers to his ears.
A few moments later the EMPEROR appears. He is carrying a large suitcase. He has a certain
forced elegance. He tries to keep his composure.
He touches the ARCHITECT with the tip of his cane.

126

EMPEROR. Help me sir! I am the only survivor of the accident.
ARCHITECT. (horrified) Fee! Fee! Feegaa! Feegaa! Fee! Fee!
.........................
Blackout
SCENE TWO
Two years later. The EMPEROR and the ARCHITECT are on stage.
EMPEROR. It’s quite simple, after all. Come on, repeat!
ARCHITECT. Escalator. (He has some difficulty in pronouncing the “s.”)
EMPEROR. (emphatically) Now I’ve lived on this island for two whole years,
I’ve given you lessons for two years, and you still hesitate! It would take
Aristotle himself to teach you the sum of two chairs and two tables.
ARCHITECT. I can already talk. No?
EMPEROR. Well . . . yes. At least, if someone drops onto this island some day
you can say to him, “Ave Caesar.”
ARCHITECT. But today you are to teach me . . .
EMPEROR. Right now listen to my muse singing the wrath of Achilles.
My throne!
(215-216)

127

Chapter 4
The Paratext and Cannibalism in Fernando Arrabal’s
The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
ARCHITECT. . . . What’s important is what I think: there’s a transmission of
thought between us.
EMPEROR. (thoroughly frightened) Tell me seriously, do you read my thoughts too?
Can you see into my mind?
ARCHITECT. I want to write. Teach me to be a writer. You must’ve been a great
author.
EMPEROR. (flattered). I’ve written some famous sonnets! And what plays, with their
monologues and their asides. No writer has succeeded in equaling me. The best
have copied me! Beethoven, d’Annunzio, James Joyce, Charles V, Shakespeare
himself, and his nephew Bernstein.
from The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
Why does the Emperor fear that the Architect can read his mind? He insists, after all, that
the Architect eat him towards the end of the play. Does he not wish his remain-ders

71

to conjoin

with the Architect? Further, why does the Architect in Fernando Arrabal’s play answer the
Emperor paraleptically? “Do you read my mind?” “I want to write; teach me!” The Emperor and
the Architect of Assyria asks what the relationships are between performance, reading, writing,
and cannibalism.
The Emperor’s wrath to destroy his own representation results in his despotic rule in The
Architect and The Emperor of Assyria. His wrath is aimless, not unlike Achilles’s, “You ignore
the hygienic virtues of cold meat,” the Emperor exclaims to the Architect, “You casserole, you
turnip boiler, you chowder-head, you fly gawker. May my wrath of Achilles fall on you” (269).

71

Meaning, both his remains and that which remains after the Architect eats his remains,
remains, i.e,. his “soul.”
128

He thinks his wrath has aim, toward the Architect, but this wrath is self-inflicted and eventually
manifests into a command for the Architect to eat of his (the Emperor’s) body at the end of his
self-proclaimed performance of a trial in order to leave representation behind.
“The best have copied me,” the Emperor tells the Architect. The Emperor embraces the
notion of being the penultimate representing agent, more so than even Shakespeare, and
curiously, in this attempt to be the embodiment of representation, the Emperor hopes to escape
older versions or representations of himself. Once the Architect begins to eat of the Emperor in
Act Two, Scene Two, he becomes the Architect. Presumably, transubstantiation occurs in this
act, for in the following scene, the stage directions indicate that “Only the Emperor’s bones are
left on the table. The Architect now has the same intontation and manners as the Emperor. When
the lights come up the Architect is sucking the last bone.” (299). However, the Emperor is not
dead; the Architect did not eat him because at the end of Act Two, Scene Three, the Architect
“hits the table with his hand and a bone rolls to the ground. He gets down under the table to pick
it up and completely disappears from sight . . . When he reappears it is the Emperor who comes
out from under the table, dressed as the Architect” (299-300). Is it that this shift proposes that
the Architect did eat the Emperor and that this representation, one character in another’s stead,
proves that? Or, is it that this shift from one actor to another is a representation of cannibalism
that is still not quite achieving the freedom that the Emperor claims he is after?
The figure of the cannibal, or the cannibalized, just stopping short, or at least, being
(un)full-filled on or off stage, collapses the represented with the actual by suggesting that the
past is always in front of you, and the present is always behind. Representation cannot be
escaped, but it can be excited to such a state that it appears to be escaped. For example, at the
end of the play, the Emperor has completely swapped places with the Architect, a swap that

129

proposes that the illusion of representation is the illusion of the body. The two are
interchangeable. At the end of the play, the Emperor, in the Architect’s clothing, is not only
interchangeable with the Architect, but after cannibalization, he is both, simultaneously and
paradoxically:
72

EMPEROR. . . . Alone at last! . . .I’ll forget the past in such a way that I’ll have
it all the more present in my mind, so that I won’t fall back into any of
my past errors . . . I’ll study and all alone I’ll discover perpetual
motion. (He stretches out a leg and looks in the opposite direction.)
Scratch my leg, tickle me . . . That’s it, there, scratch well . . . Harder.
With your nails, I tell you. Harder, scratch harder. Still harder. Lower.
Harder. Harder. ;
Note that it is the reliance on the material that assures the Emperor that “I am not what I am.”

73

The cannibalism supposedly assures he is alone, but, he is not. The writing does not work. Does
the eating? Not only does the Emperor, inside the Architect, make the Architect the Emperor,
“he” is not singular, and he is not quite outside of representation, for the Architect, who once, in
the past, was the Emperor, is still, in the present, the Architect. The past always eats the present,
and this focus on the material to get outside the represented now or present fails.
The Emperor wishes to lose the ability to represent, and his anxiety, unlike Polyphemus
in The Odyssey, for example, is that he will not. Polyphemus of the Cyclops stands as testament
to the anxiety of being unable to express oneself abstractly with language.

74

The Architect (not)

eating the Emperor enacts the meat of the matter at hand: The Emperor’s command to be eaten
reveals that the space between performance and performativity is a cannibalizing one.

72

One cannot help but recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inescapable phrase, “Free at last!”
Isolation and freedom go hand in hand in The Emperor and the Architect of Assyria.
73
74

Iago from Othello.
“Who hurts you?” ask the other Cyclops on the island. “Nobody,” replies Polyphemus.
130

For the Emperor, his fear is that he cannot leave the representation he perceives exists
outside of himself. He wishes to be set free by being punished, by being cannibalized. He is to be
set free by being reconstituted within the Architect, presumably. It must be cannibalization, for
nothing else the Emperor has tried works. In a long soliloquy that shifts in voice and tone, the
Emperor embodies a variety of individuals. For example:
I’d dreamed . . . That I’d write and that I would be a great poet . . . what a
poet I would have been . . . Emperor, what do you want me to do? I’m your
subject. Command me. (247)
The Emperor wants to be un-representable, truly alone and without the need to exist with it. The
corporeal body of his is the most prescient reminder of his being a sign, a sign of a bad husband,
a despot, a cross-dresser, a madman, etc. For example:
EMPEROR. . . . I would like to die disguised. (A pause.) Disguised as the Bishop\
of Chess.
ARCHITECT. As what?
EMPEROR. The Bishop of Chess . . . a bishop in the game of chess. Accede
to my wishes. It’s very simple: you place a little stick between my legs so
that I can stand up like a chess piece and you cover me with the mad
Bishop’s armor. (234)
Invoking/exhuming his ex-wife, being her, that does not get him outside of his own skin; it does
not work. He cannot purge himself of the trappings of representation, of himself to himself via
the expunging of himself in the dressing up as his ex-wife. Even as his ex-wife, she verifies those
earlier representations of him, as a murderer, for example.
He is stuck in a feedback loop. The more he embodies others to deny who he was or is,
the more those performed embodiments confirm that he is exactly who he does not want to be.
So, for the Emperor, perhaps by putting the Architect through a variety of trials or tests, putting
himself up for trial in the second half of the play, or by pontificating about the metaphysical

131

nature of God or wondering about ontological questions, perhaps these acts will get him over
what seems to be a near sickness of sorts.
Not unlike a drugged Catherine in Suddenly, Last Summer, the Emperor seems to be
possessed, talking outside of himself. Unlike Catherine’s talking, though, the Emperor’s is that
of an embodied voice, inside of him, that is not his own. Someone else is doing the talking, and
there is no reason to believe otherwise; some force may have taken over this person portraying
the Emperor. He is sick with being stuck in a feedback loop: The more he performs, the less he is
free. Performance does not even free him from representation. None of these manifestations
allow him to land on the island of the Cyclops. “Dependence on representation sickens me. I can
leave if I want to, but I don’t want to…maybe just a little, but it’s impossible, really, so what are
we talking about?”
The Emperor’s wrath is his throne, evoked/sung by a muse. Despotic rule is felt via his
royal chair.

75

In this instance, the Emperor does not evoke representation; this is not metonymic

worship; it is transubstantiated (im)materiality. There is no muse, no song. The inexpressible
aura of the Emperor’s power gets expressed in the actual, aural, performative silence of the
muse’s song. Because each subsequent scene consumes the one that came before it, as time and
space are neither shared nor divided among the various characters in the play, inside has become
outside; time is non/linear, for San Diego and for The Architect and the Emperor. Erik Østerud’s
Theatrical and Narrative Space studies J.P. Jacobsen’s short-story “Mogens” to suggest that in
the modern era of the twentieth century there may not always be a “direct correlation between
meaning and aesthetic representation . . . [that] [w]hen the truth cannot be deduced from reality
itself, but requires exegetic explanation . . . the confidence in the apparatus of interpretation he

75

Meaning his backside, i.e., an ass, which he tries to become in Act 1.
132

applies is of paramount importance” (103, 132, 133). The “confidence” of aesthetic
representation and interpretation, especially in this project, must exist in order for one to be able
to doubt that he is a narcissist. It is a masking effort
/
(Repeat!)

San Diego’s uttered prologue mirrors the epilogue of the previous chapter and establishes
yet another frame and another “meat of the matter” that the Conclusion will unpack. If the
Introduction produces a map or guide to this study, then the Conclusion serves to cannibalize it.
The project attempts to enact the paratextual, both in a macroscopic manner and also in a
microscopic matter. This project contends that it is the figure of the cannibal, or at least, it
attempts to roughly perform the very thing it attempts to describe. For example, Chapter 1, which
focuses on Sebastian’s transubstantiation through the calling forth of a talking that perpetuates
his cannibalization, eats, and vice versa, Chapter 4, which focuses on the Emperor’s inability to
achieve transubstantiation with talking. The Emperor’s fits and tantrums at the end of his trial are
beginning to sound as if he is getting a little unintelligible, and it is the pre-representational he is
after. His movement is towards a pre-symbolic, perhaps even an animal-like state. For example,
his attempts to get the Architect to ride him, not as if he is a donkey, but rather, as a donkey, i.e.,
the riding is supposed to, the Emperor hopes, transform him into one. The performing fails.
Transformation, transubstantiation cannot occur without cannibalism, which is the only means to
experiencing what Derrida calls, in his study of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, “life before birth.”
As the Emperor hopes to escape representation, which ultimately, he thinks, rests in the
assurance of the material, and its ability to be consumed, Catherine hopes in Suddenly, Last
Summer to imbibe and relish in representation. Chapter 1 states:
133

Sebastian . . . is both and never was. His re-membering on stage is a performance
in itself. Within the heart of that performance is Catherine’s disembodied voice;
she is outside of herself as she goes over her story, which has clearly been
rehearsed before, and is being performed, yet again, one more time. The voice
that is doing the speaking is in question. Just because she seems to be talking,
some other force within must be at the helm. (2)
It is a performative utterance that transubstantiates Sebastian, revealing representation has a
cannibal heart. In Chapter 4, the Emperor finds that even utterances fail him. He cannot reach the
pre-symbolic; he cannot combine bits of himself with the Architect, his work of art, his work in
progress. So, the work of art must do it for him. “The performing fails. Transformation,
transubstantiation,” to reiterate, “cannot occur without cannibalism, which is the only means to
experiencing what Derrida . . . calls ‘life before birth.’” What kind of cannibalism is this?

/
Think of the Prologue of San Diego and the disembodied voices at the end of The
Architect and the Emperor of Assyria as a means to understanding how mimesis is a cannibalistic
process at its heart that is felt in an affective (paratextual) way.
The Prologue to San Diego opens the play this way:
David Greig is sitting in an aeroplane seat.
As convention dictates that a dissertation shall progress linearly, so, too does convention dictate
that the reader understand the italics listed above as stage directions. By using commands such as
(Repeat!) in this project, the traditional, and expected, format of a dissertation must follow
certain Enlightenment rules of argumentation. This evolution is misleading. It portends
understanding shall be attained via the shape or form of my argument. It is not “my” argument. It
134

is “yours.” I do not evoke reader-response theory. I suggest, instead, that language itself does not
want your order. It fights all its expectations and intentions. Derrida reiterates this concept over
and over. The difference here is that eventually, this process reaches an end point. The anxiety of
language, of the symbolic, of representation reversing its trajectory and falling back in on itself,
as all linear arguments do, lies in this dedication to causality. (Do we not continually go back to a
classic modeled piece and “pick at it” and “pierce” it and “violate” the text in order to render and
squeeze more meaning out of it?) This project explicitly plays with the notion that body and text
are inseparable, that one exists interdependently, after-the-fact.
The argument is “yours,” and thus, it then commands. But it does not command “you.” It
commands itself, as all language does. The use of cannibalism in these plays allows for this
process to be unveiled to a degree. Therefore, a command, such as (Repeat!), signals that that
which came before has been re-mapped; it is no longer a sign for editorial work to be done;
although it is; it is a designation of that which is about to happen, conceptually speaking. You
have read this before, and it consumes your current reading right now, to-be-read.
(Reconstitute!)
By shaping the argument in a non-linear way the reader understands the body is nonlinear, that the body of the text is not conventional. Convention dictates, commands, that the
reader understand the italics as stage directions, as well as to understand “David Greig” as the
person/a of the playwright. “It’s really (not)/‘him’ in there saying things about ‘real’ time and
‘real’ places, like Scotland.” In lieu of other speeches in the play, wherein poetry and prose
conflate, one wonders if this convention entirely holds water. Is the outside now the inside of the
theatre, as in Kane’s Blasted?

135

The character David Greig opens the Prologue with a speech, a rather long speech. Time,
as much as place, and how to represent both are on the character’s mind:
It’s the summer of 2000. I’m flying to San Diego, California. It will be the
first time I have ever visited the American continent. I have been in transit
for some eighteen hours now and for almost all that time I have been awake
and drinking alcohol . . . despite being such a great place to live, San Diego
is featured in almost no fictions, films, novels, or plays, but it has, and I quote
‘served as the un-named backdrop for several episodes of America’s Missing
Children. (5)
The skene (backdrop) metaphorically shows a myriad of lost children on stage, and, as it
seamlessly shifts (and does not) from “scene” to “scene,” or rather, from place to place, within a
fictional San Diego, it becomes harder and harder to see where one should locate herself in
relation to the stage, in “relation” with figures in the play. When in San Diego Daniel is renamed to Grey Lag, the action shifts from one re-naming to another. David gets re-named and remarked via Marie’s volunteering for her flesh to be eaten, on stage, seen. These characters also
interact, however tangentially or directly, but not quite at the same time or place:
INNOCENT. Son, you killed a fat goose today
For us to eat at this, the feast of your naming
A meaty white goose to eat
Since you brought us the gift of a goose, we’ll call you
Grey Lag
After the goose.
GREY LAG. Grey Lag.
...................
INNOCENT. Then let us pray—Holy Father, help us push
the desert back tomorrow morning
Help us shape the meat into patties . . .
............
Roger
Over and out
Please cut into the flesh
Laura cuts a thin slice from her body.
136

.....
The sound of a car screeching to a halt a little way up
the road.
The Pilot runs toward the car.
PILOT. Please. Please. Wait.
Amy walks along the dusty path by the side of the
road to where David is lying.
AMY. Oh my God.
PILOT. We have to get him to a hospital.
She kneels by David and holds him.
Laura starts to bandage herself up.
Past reviews have qualified these kinds of shifts as a meta or reflexive gesture. The jest, though,
has to do with the gestures of the bodies on stage. Rather than seeing the images of words
projected onto the background. Sounds on stage and in the script, have no origin of place:
MARIE. Have you got the baby monitor?
ANDREW. Yeah.
MARIE. Switch it on.
Andrew switches the monitor on. He passes it to Marie.
The sound of a baby breathing close to a microphone.
(9)
Characters on stage have no origins of place or of time. David exists both within and without the
various diegeses/personas in the play. Immediately following the switching on of the baby
monitor David states:
Speedbird seven november, turn to heading twofive-zero, join localizer for runway two-six right. Your
traffic is twelve o’clock, five ahead now. Do you have
the airport in sight?
PILOT. We have the airport, but not the craft.
(9)
137

As David embodies, but does not, all the characters in the play (here, he speaks as/for/with the
air traffic controller), the materiality, the so-called proof of his being there, is being challenged.
Defining a “sound” as a marking one cannot see. The disembodied voices which speak
throughout the play also challenge the ability to prove aesthetic representation and experience
via the material:
VOICE. First new message
Received today at 7.21 p.m.
To listen to the message, press one
.............
(112)
Laura’s voice is then heard on an answering machine, presumably because a prop is treated as an
answering machine. Juxtaposed with characters looking for individuals who are not there (but
are), such as Laura’s search for her dad, leaving an origin-less message for him:
LAURA’S VOICE. Dad
I’m in Scotland
I’m sorry.
(112)
One has already seen Laura’s body on stage. One figures this as the origin of the sound (or the
76

machine); it is a representation of her. However, what if

the play is staged using different

voices, at different times, for “Laura” or “David”? The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish suggests
the play “cruises with chilly, high-altitude detachment over similar psychological terrain . . . The
cast, milling around a set as soulless and sterile as a departure lounge . . . wear—on and off—
grey T-shirts bearing his [David Greig’s] name” ( ). The e/affects of the voices can have similar
e/affects as the interchangeability of the images have. The imaged words on display and the
“looping video projection” (or at least what seemed like a video projection) of David up above

76

I consciously evoke the hypothetical.
138

the other characters numb out the significance of subjectivity in the play; as screens reconstitute
language as hieroglyphic images on screens, and then negated entirely as the simulated pain of
cannibalism ensues. How does this work, this pain function on the page? Is the mimetic faculty
the same in this instance? Artaud’s theatre may get manifested on the page, the very frame he
desired to escape, that the Emperor desires to escape: Representation. The sounds, of smacking,
of slurping down human flesh, enact an inexpressibility that is marked “in transit, in an aircraft,
fixed in our seat, surrounded by a limited number of people . . . that ‘we can be certain we
belong’ (Cavendish). This sense of collective belonging through aesthetics is thwarted in this
play as the training one gets to understand conventional play reading and watching is confirmed
in the material.
Language is supposed to function in a similar way. “In transit.” Always changing code
that must be continually interpreted and transcribed, always moving, like a plane. Complete
atrophy occurs otherwise:
EMPEROR (changing the subject).

77

Have you prepared the cross?

78

ARCHITECT. There it is. (Pointing to the bushes.) Will you crucify me
now?
EMPEROR. What! I’m the one who has to be crucified! Isn’t it me?
ARCHITECT. We drew by lot. Have you forgotten?
EMPEROR (angrily). How could that be? We drew by lot to see who would
atone for humanity?
ARCHITECT. Master, you forget everything.
EMPEROR. How did we draw by lot? With what?
77

Ten point font. (Please note that Proquest refuses alteration to the footnoting font size, from
12 pt to 10pt)
78

Twelve point font.
139

ARCHITECT. With a straw.
EMPEROR (Laughing like a madman). A straw! A straw!

79

ARCHITECT. Why are you laughing, master?
EMPEROR. I never told you what the word “straw” means.
ARCHITECT. You said . . .
EMPEROR (changing the subject). My blind slave girls who taught me
philosophy dressed only in pink bath towels! What a memory
I have! I remember as if it were yesterday. How they caressed
my divine body, how they cleansed its dirtiest corners such as . . .
To horse!
ARCHITECT. Shall I be the horse?
EMPEROR. No, I will.
He gets down on all fours. The ARCHITECT straddles him.

Say to me: gee up!
ARCHITECT. Gee-up horsey!
EMPEROR. Beat me with a whip! (218-219)
Even the nearly inexpressible noise, such as what Metz describes (see above), such as David
eating Laura’s flesh, which the stage directions denote as him “swallow[ing] something” (82).
One can imagine the play having this done or shown in silence, but whether the sound is
intimated through a speaker (as a sound effect) or whether the sound is merely implied but not
“actually” heard, one experiences this dislocation of the sound, either way, as deafening. It is as
if the eating has been taken off stage via sounds’ displacement. (I want the sound to own/be
owned as the Author owns/is owned), making the power of the act all the more muddled.

79

Please refer to Richard III’s plea for a horse, making more ‘hay’ out of the moment.
140

At the end of the play, which correlates with the sounds of a plane landing and hearing
the Pilot exclaim:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to San Diego, we hope you enjoyed
flying with us today. The temperature outside is a rather warm 82
degrees and the local time is 3.37 p.m.
Thanks once again for flying with us and we hope you’ll fly with us
again soon.
80
...
Cabin crew, door to manual.
The End.
(116)
Presumably, the reader and the audience have been on the flight the entire time, perhaps. Or, the
plane is just a metaphor for time. Or, it is through the dislocation of the sound of the plane’s
landing and seeing the plane that renders an interchangeability with the space of the auditorium
and the place of reading, or, the outside. Earlier, the Pilot denotes (maps/marks) where one is,
which defied/deifies place (?) in the play:
. . . It has just, at this precise moment—3.17 p.m. San Diego time, 11.17
81
p.m. London time —occurred to me that America’s Missing Children
are perhaps drawn to San Diego because it is sufficiently large and emits a
rhythmical sound . . . in reality—time and place no longer exist in the
world
There is no time in the city
There is no place on the high street
The safety of the ground is an illusion
Co-ordinated universal time—aeroplane time—is the
only time we experience which never changes
The cabin of the aircraft is the only space where we
can be certain that we belong—we have a ticket with our
name on it
On the seat in front of us there is a map which shows
us clearly where we are going
And we are going forwards
......................
80
81

This elliptical notation is part of the text on the page.
It is and is not that precise time.
141

We don’t know how planes work
We don’t want to know how planes work
We want to be part of the rhythm
We want to belong
We want to see familiar things
Ladies and gentlemen
82
...
The aircraft is your village
‘Welcome home.’
Laura starts sucking her thumb
(6, 78-79)

83

The play opens at 3.17 and ends at 3.17. The time of the traveling should sync with the sound of
San Diego, constructing cadenced rhythms in the play. David states in the opening Prologue,
“San Diego . . . is sufficiently large and emits rhythmical sound” (6). Simultaneously, there are
no sounds that capture that rhythm, per se. Airplane noises/sound effects, gulping and
swallowing, baby breathing sounds, none of these are site/sight specific. There is a cadence (but
not) in the play, which, at first glance suggests the play works through a kind of representation.
Examining the play further, though, reveals a series of simulations that have little to do with San
Diego and everything to do with the construction of meaning via communication (or the lack
thereof). The sounds are mapped, or at least, the characters continually attempt to find a way to
map by using sound, but they cannot. The body, subsequently, cannot be identified via
conventional means of identification.
Exegesis
Reviews avoid this difficulty by explaining away the play as overtly didactic,
statement about American “rootlessness,”

82
83

85

84

as a

or a manifestation of psychology on stage. Perhaps it

The elliptical notation is part of the text on the page.
Note Cate’s thumb sucking in Blasted.
142

is because audiences have seen it all already before…it’s familiar territory…because it is on a
plane. Further, similar critics and dramatists can be found expressing Arrabal’s biography (like
with Kane’s or Williams’) as a means to understanding the play.

(The dislocation of sound parallels the dislocation of origins of sight in the play.)
[SOUND]
The material loudness of the play on the page is not unlike hearing sound when one sees the
word above. The word can become something more, a sound that is not a sound. This experience
mutes these author function delusions that have been applied to Kane and Williams, looking for
intent in the work; the SOUND dislocates them from the work entirely, which ironically enough,
allows Sebastian, for example, through Catherine’s talking, to meld with his.
This dislocated, aesthetic sense of mut-ation forces the Emperor to discover a way to reand then un-mark himself. The (im)material loudness of the play forces him to look to the actual
body for relief. For the Emperor, it is not just that the Architect (rather than the Emperor) had no
mark or name before the Emperor came; it is not just that the Architect cannot speak. It is that
the speaking sounds wrong. It sounds incongruent with what the Emperor images of sound via
the signifier “s.” As the characters discuss materiality (cannibalizing the body) in metaphorical
and pragmatic ways (one must eat to survive), as neither represented, simulated or even “real”
ways of understanding anthropophagi apply, the material, in the conventional sense, has less and
less “to do with it.” The aural sounds the Architect makes are not quite accurate enough. The
Emperor’s linguistic training of his pupil is to transform the Architect from a mere beast into a
84

Recall Colin Thomas, “A major figure in one of his story lines is an airline pilot, who is also a
screwup and the father of two other adult characters . . . I can figure that out for myself; by
explaining everything, Greig makes it look loke he doesn’t trust his audience.”
85

Thomas, “The Scottish Greig uses his American setting to explore rootlessness.”
143

Man. The lisp of the “s” does not emphasize the intended masculine essence of language (see
Kristeva). Worse than becoming a beast, the Emperor must ensure that the Architect does not
stray too terribly far from his masculinity. Otherwise, he may not be attractive to the Emperor,
for it is not the set, the costume that makes one a woman and another man. The roles they play
have little to do with whether a dress is donned or not. Although the tags of gender can be linked
to clothing, the Architect’s doing is what “really” makes him a donkey, for example. Or, a cow:
EMPEROR. Today, I’ll play fiancée . . .
....................
ARCHITECT. The skirts!
EMPEROR. But aren’t we going to play priests today?
ARCHITECT. All right, I see you don’t want to.
....................
ARCHITECT. Moo! Moo!
(Getting on all fours)
You see! I’m a cow.
(222, 225)
There must be the proper sound to accompany the activity of cow-ness. The Architect in Act One
seems to be unaware of this, so in Act Two, once the Emperor’s trial begins for his supposed and
earlier murder of his wife, the Architect continues with this belief that prop (which is a double
prop in this instance, for the character does not believe the dress or the judge’s wig are “real” but
are ways for him to access a certain behavior) determines activity. The Emperor continually
reiterates that it is as much the language that manifests activity. It is not that the characters put on
a mask or wears hooves. It is because of the command that “it” is done. The Architect likes to be
told to be ridden. The language not only performs, it must perform in particular ways, which are
144

in/of the body. The body manifests through language, which becomes conflated/overlapped with
the manifested language that Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer hopes to enact, if only in his
sacrifice.
86

(/)

If the Author’s Note remaps Blasted, then so too does the Editor’s note. With the
conflation of the word and the body comes the dilemma of how one is to show that the body as a
proveable entity. It cannot be mapped. In the face of the irrefutability of the body, one realizes
that there must be more to the body than the material. The “Editor’s Note” mentioned in Chapter
4, (which may or may not be Grieg’s) also draws attention to the need of there being doubts
about the material being “all that there is.” However, in order to reaffirm that there is no doubt
that there is more is a cover for the material, i.e., that “that is all that there is”; there is no
ephemeral, non-quantifiable, especially when we say it is so, which reproduces a need for an
origin, for an originating point, for someone to tell me what the play is about so that I can
dismiss what she said and go about my business. The author . . . therein lies the “more than,”
which does not really matter.
[Reconstitute!]
For Peter Ives, there is, in fact, “more than” the language on the page/the body on the
stage. He states that “immanent, spontaneous grammars . . . subconsciously guide our use of
language and the normative grammar used to regulate speech in more formal ways” (41, 44,

86

The more you see this, the less it denotes something different from other designations. As
the symbol is commanded to be found, as the symbol is not found, as the symbol itself
commands (but does not because it is not there, but does because its absence is presence), the
argument is able to explicitly show how it contracts and expands in a paratextual, selfcannibalizing manner.
145

45).

87

If language and the body are inseparable, then one might understand Bell’s comment

about “the imaginary theatrical present” in his review of Andrew Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props
as a lightning rod, of sorts, to understand an inherent tension within the materialist perspective
that Bell claims Sofer’s argument cannot overcome, i.e., the inescapability of the symbolic. The
actual and the symbolic overlap in Kane’s Blasted for the reader, which renders a brief, singular
experience. That aesthetic experience can be considered a cannibalistic, paratextual one. The
actual and the symbolic overlap in Greig’s San Diego, but for different reasons.
Laura’s commands to eat her flesh, not unlike Christ’s command to his disciples to eat his
flesh and drink his blood (which was not a simulated practice in the early church;
transubstantiation occurred via real flesh on stage to be consumed by the participants, which, if
on stage, is still representation-?). Many of those commands, along with the speech patterns of a
multitude of characters in San Diego challenge the idea that the written word and the spoken
sound are necessarily always-already distant. The characters often speak in prose, and they often
speak in what appears to be poetry, or shape poetry. One asks what these “moves” have on the
reader.
Perhaps Bell is thinking of a more psychoanalytic or semiotic model to best understand
how theatre works. In other words, the play cannot signify to its potential sans psychoanalysis, or
at least, some other model (linguistic-?) that allows Bell to get to the audience “through the back
door.”

88

This perspective that literary criticism is somehow “safer” or more “certain” in an

87

Ives uses Bakhtin’s notions of the carnival and Gramsci’s theories regarding language to
make these claims.
88

Courtesy of Dr. Lance Norman.
146

“imaginary theatrical present” strikes me as quite odd,

89

as most critics, if asked what the

primary difference is, say, between theatre and film, it is the liveness, the present/presence of it,
both literally and figuratively (see Kane’s note above), which serve to provide conditions for
representation to falter. To be safe in an image-nary temporal, physical, and/or psychological
space sounds rather like a disavowal of the language on the page in order to dismiss the symbolic
limitations of the corporeal bodies on the stage. The body, the objects are either not manifested
by the written, to-be-spoken language, or the body transcends language via its transgression of
the body.
In other words, “Everything [that] is written in a map in God’s head” in San Diego is just
as much “His” map as it is a map inside one’s own head, as Daniel suggests:
I know exactly where I’m going. I know exactly
It’s in a map in my head” (84).
The map that the reader cannot help but note is how the words on the page are organized, and
direct, not unlike the Author’s Note in Blasted directs and enacts, a consciousness for the reader
that is paratextual and cannibalistic. What is not revealed is that despite what Daniel says, that is
not necessarily what is shown to the reader, as he suggests. The arrangement of the words on the
page (a poetic convention-?) defy the very thing Daniel says. One cannot prove the map in God’s
head, just as one cannot prove “where” one is going in San Diego. Saunders calls this e/affect
“peripatetic spatial shifts” (4).

89

Please note that this study does not single out Bell’s review as necessarily unique, but rather,
it considers his review as the most useful example to render a theoretical archaeology, of sorts,
to consider Kane’s Blasted.
147

90

Christopher Wixson’s incisive

study of Blasted suggests that the body cannot be

mapped; which, it can-nibalistically hearing. For Wixson, the body can move beyond being
marked; it can move through representation. Wixson states, “the limits of language[], the
inability of theory [is that it cannot] [] manifest the material, or useful body [;] [in Blasted] the
body is undeniable, when the body’s material presence is a condition of the circumstance” (par.
15). And, physical pain is perhaps the primary way to acknowledge this fact. It’s as if to say, “If
I am sucking out your eyes, you will feel it, and any discourse you might like to have about
‘God’ or ‘Father Christmas’ is immaterial.” The matter at hand is the matter of your body being
put through the ringer. And, if Ian feels pain, then the rest of us do too. Wixson continues:
Elaine Scarry, in her introduction to The Body in Pain, writes that
‘physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it
. . . .’ Jeanie Forte argues that the theater’s primary canvas is the body for
articulating and crossing the limits of discourse . . . Scarry suggests that
“apprehension of another’s pain is in part the awakening to the existence of
ulterior place.” (web)
It is the image-nary canvas, the primal, primary, all-important body that is supposed to be the
“end” because it can defy all forms of representation. Initiated through pain, it has the potential
to render a consciousness about an “invisible geography” (Scarry qtd. in Wixson) that transcends
the material, that transcends the theatre itself. However, one can reach a moment when pain is no
longer pain. In the original Greek, “theatron” translates to “seeing place.” It is what is seen that
is supposed to be the most important element of the stage. Because Wixson has yet to really
discover a “review or critical appraisal of the play that does not itself resort to spatial language

90

The study does a violence to the work; it incises.
148

and metaphors” (par. 5), he considers the play in this way, too. I agree this metaphorical catch is
quite nearly undeniable and unavoidable. Note the paratextual nature of this study, for example.
And, in part, this is the danger that the image-nary world of the theatre holds. Through the use of
simulated, image-nary presentation of cannibalism on stage, the very canvas of the play itself
threatens to pull itself apart, threatens to cannibalize itself. It is in this moment, that language can
manifest a more really represented body than the one that is actually seen. When the stage
directions indicate that after Ian consumes the dead baby he gets under the floorboards with its
clothing and sticks his head out. Then, he dies:
Ian eats the baby.
He puts the remains back in the baby’s blanket and puts the bundle back
in the hole.
A beat, then he climbs in after it and lies down, head poling out of the
floor.
He dies with relief.
It starts to rain on him, coming through the roof.
Eventually.
IAN. Shit.
Ian does not die. It is just a word. At first glance, what is stated and what happens seems to
dislocate the word from the body. However, upon closer examination this denotation is for the
reader. Not for the performance. The performer understands this direction not as a command but
as a state of being to pretend. This second level of representation, or simulation in the Platonic
sense of the term, divides the art from the actual. “I’m not really to eat the baby or die…just as
the audience knows I’m not.” The difference here is that the actor does not perform “real” death.
He knows she is to “wake up” in just a bit. The curtain does not drop on him. He is not carried

149

off stage, a victim of the rape, of the lack of food, of a lack of a cure for cancer, of a broken
heart.
[Repeat!]
The issue lies in Bell’s last statement about Sofer’s analysis of props. Actual productions
are “messy”; the image, the object on stage is not really being considered, from Bell’s point of
view. The image falls back onto the symbolic in Sofer’s argument, according to Bell. The word
is safe; it is not dangerous; its spatial metaphors cannot touch the inexpressible that is expressed
through the body in pain. However, because Bell refuses to consider present-ness/presence as an
actual possibility, one wonders how he is sees the material in the first place. Wixson considers
the body, in its present-ness, as, in part, the means to eschew representation. Bell implies there is
no such thing. There appears to be an inherent link between temporality and the word made flesh
that concerns Bell, and he should be afraid. There is a materialism that is unseen, a dark matter,
if you will, which traditionally speaking, has not been the application of this model. Such an
application will yield a new way of considering how representation works. Cannibalism on stage
offers this opportunity. The stage is rendered image-less through the excess of the “violence”
that is simulated on stage. Cannibalism, falling last in the order of violent acts: Ian penetrates
(rapes) Cate. The Soldier penetrates (rapes) Ian. The Soldier penetrates himself (blows his brains
out). Ian consumes a recently-deceased baby, functions differently than these other events. The
Author’s Note’s penetration of the play on the page becomes inseparable from it. Violence gives
way to wholeness, between object and subject.
Although evoking a consciousness of a violation, the play does not allow for the act of
cannibalism to be considered as purely penetrative, like these other moments. If one wishes to
consider these transgressions of the body as a means to see the primacy of the body over

150

consciousness, then cannibalism must be considered as the balm that heals all these wounds, and
in so doing, collapses actuality and representation together. Wixson’s study of Blasted, using
Elaine Scarry’s ideas about pain and the body, suggests that Ian’s body, in pain, thwarts
representation. However, there is no pain in Ian’s actions. We are relieved he is not going to die,
as Cate nurses him, not back to health, but to a different space, a temporal shift that “is a space
where convention and language itself will collapse into non-iterability, to be replaced by Kane’s
poetics of corporeality and populated by bodies of pain” (Saunders 3).
(not) Sarah Kane/the Archimperor
However, because the Author and the Writer are not the same, because the Author serves
a narrative function, because typical, grammatical encoding is re/uncoded, I cannot presume that
the actions are as important as the words on the page, the words that are then interpreted,
transcribed by the actors, and reinterpreted by the audience, following a somewhat Derridean
premise, that the written word has gotten too much attention in the Western tradition and that the
spoken word is just as powerful. Instead, through this un/recoding, the taboo of taboos at the
very end of the play, when Ian consumes a dead baby, must seem/appear to be, not equally
powerful, and they are, nor indistinguishable, which implies an “authentic” distinction at some
point in the past. Cannibalism is not a marker for the uncivilized nor for the post-civilized
(Jonathan Swift comes to mind). The two are the same. There is no difference between the
(im/)material. Cannibalism on stage is a presentation of a representation of presentation that
thwarts typical notions of not just bifurcation, and its destruction in the twentieth century, but
implodes these notions upon one another. Cannibalism simulated on stage is immaterial. “I
cannot see to see,” as Emily Dickinson puts it, and the more I see, the more it appears off stage.

151

One need look no further than the work’s consumption of the Foucauldian author
function. The work places it on a Mobiüs strip. Foucault had every reason to be authorized/to be
fearful of being authorized; it is an inevitable proceeding. It happens after you’ve “made it.”
Look at the name of this anthology: SARAH KANE. Boom. This designation gets consumed with
the “Author’s note” proceeding the title/preceding the play. Further, placing the “Editor’s note”
after the “Author’s note” reifies the author function, first, and second, consumes it by the reiteration of this hierarchy. They are integrated, doubly-re-iterated author function statements
which cancel each other out. Yet, the performance, going back to earlier, must also be considered
an integral piece of the work, at least, insofar as the performers and the director are concerned.
The audience can have no way of knowing that a / signifies an interruption, as opposed to an
ambivalent action or state of mind; in point of fact, the audience won’t know the difference
because it won’t see either. Or will it? The “Author’s note” serves to do what it says it does. It
interrupts the play, for as the first half of this chapter will show, the bifurcations between
actor/audience, written text and spoken, acted language, a fictional author and the “real” one;
interruption and conflation are revealed to be the same thing through the presentation of
cannibalism on stage.
At first glance, it appears as though Kane’s, or rather, the author’s note, appears to echo a
tension between the sign of the text and the signifieds of the performance, whatever they might
be. The author’s note seems to emphasize a gap between the written word and the to-be/alreadyspoken words of the actors, apparently valuing the aural, the immaterial, the liveness of the
experience of the play. Why else would “the author” decide to use grammar in a way other than
what is typically understood when one encounters the “/” or the “[ ]” or the “( )” signifiers?
Typically, the “/” indicates ambivalence, unity, even dialectical understanding. Here, the

152

opposite concept is evoked. An “interruption” is what the author is after. One imagines a
penetrative act. The backwards slash is literalized; it performs on the page for the actor in an
un/familiar way. There is now interruption and conjoining, conflated. This kind of tension can
and cannot last. The actor is forced into an awareness that transcends and/or reifies the material.
When you ask, “Why not use notations previously used by playwrights, such as an elliptical
mark, “. . .” or a dash, “—” or no notation at all, which can be found in 4.48 Psychosis, to
indicate indications? Derrida suggests such a distance between the spoken and the written is a
necessary illusion in order to maintain a sense of ontological and material certainty over one’s
existence. In reality, there is no such assurance. “Undecidability” or an “irreducible difference”
is what gets yielded in the end. What can never know due to the contextuality of meaning.
Greig’s authorization of Kane’s work must be accounted for when considering his because of
“his” preface or prologue or paratextual move that is the “Editor’s Note.” His work is situated
between Kane’s and the script of the play. The Author’s Note and the script reconstitute the
Editor’s note as bits and pieces of themselves. There is a w/hole-y (not holy), transubstantiated
text for the consumer.
Further, one can see cannibalization at work in the irreducible sameness/difference that
occurs at the very end of the play. The Soldier raping Ian roughly half-way through the play can
serve to parallel the penetrative quality of marking, of the Symbolic. But Ian’s eating of the dead
baby at the very end functions quite differently than any of the other excessive or violent acts
that appear. According to Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, this “grotesque excess . . . can be seen as
an extreme attempt to hold on to life, as a grotesque body swallowing the product of the womb.
Kane seems to argue that the process of renewal might never end in spite of death . . .
swallowing the world and being swallowed by the world themselves” (83). This assessment,

153

though, falls short of accounting for, or not, how such a shift in symbolic coding will transfer
onto the actors’ performances. In an abstract sense, “delivery” includes just about “anything that
works,” apart from/a part of the written text. Thus, joining together, the typical coding of the
symbol “/” is inverted to mean stopping before continuing. Very well. But how does the aural get
produced? In a very pragmatic and material sense, how can one appear to do this while the
audience has no concept of this symbolic change? The words on the page, through the acting,
materialize in Ian’s cannibalistic action.
Peter Buse in his Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama (2001)
indicates that there is a kind of ambivalence in this act, which suggests a death-wish: Ian both
wants and does not want to die. Using Shoshana Felman’s theories about trauma,

91

he indicates

that Ian “leaves the [witnesses, or,] audience feeling morally and ethically ambivalent” (178). He
goes on to state that:
[t]he actuality of the range of distressing acts Ian carries out in Cate’s
absence . . . is called into doubt by the staging—the lights come up and
then go down for each ‘vignette’—but most of all by the final miniature
scene: ‘He dies with relief.’ The death must be a wish fulfillment realized
in Ian’s imagination because he clearly does not dies in the world of the
play; it ends with his survival with Cate. (emphases mine, 179-80)
Of course, Buse moves the site of witnessing from the audience to the critic. He concludes that
the reviewer is now “expected to be immediately eloquent . . . passing judgment on behalf of
others (a readership whose expectations put even more limitations and pressures on the witness)
. . . It is . . . no coincidence . . . that ‘trauma theory’ has arisen in the wake of the global triumph
91

Specifically, from her 1992 work Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (1992).
154

of the mass media, as a tentative attempt to slow them down” (187). Buse contends that to
witness the play Blasted is to preclude abilities to digest and process “what it means,” and
further, these abilities are even more elusive and pressurizing for the professional critic,
encountering the play. Cannibalism heals trauma, serving as an impediment to materiality
through a representation that defies its presentation.
The Emperor’s talking is talking too Long: Speed it Up
At the prospect of tapping into pure representation, the Emperor becomes desperate:
EMPEROR. (after drinking) What’s that? Now you talk to the birds in my
language.
ARCHITECT. That doesn’t matter. What’s important is what I think: there’s
a transmission of thought between us.
EMPEROR. (thoroughly frightened) Tell me seriously, do you read my thoughts
too? Can you see into my mind?
ARCHITECT. I want to write. Teach me to be a writer. You must’ve been a
great author.
EMPEROR. (flattered) I’ve written some famous sonnets! And what plays,
with their monologues and their asides. No writer has succeeded in
equaling me! Beethoven, d’Annunzio, James Joyce, Charles V,
Shakespeare himself, and his nephew Bernstein.
(240)
A few points: First, ESP is horrifying for him. “You can read my mind?” Pure(er), or at least,
less mediated representation rears its head. Second, the means by which the Architect gets the
Emperor to calm down is to refer to writing, to the Emperor’s Authorship. He needs that
delusion, that mask; he hides in one kind of representation to escape another. Third, he moves to
music, perhaps as an attempt to escape representation, not unlike how Barthes refers to
Beethoven’s work. However, we hear no music. He only mentions Beethoven with himself, as
Author. Fourth, it is the asides, the paratextual that marks a good writer. Fifth, by marking

155

himself as a good writer, he precludes the paratextual, cannibalistic, transubstantiation that
Catherine affords Sebastian. Fifth, the only way to be like him is to be him, for copying just will
not cut it. You may just have to cut him and eat him to do it, Architect.

156

Conclusion
The Paraleptical/the Paratext:
Titus Andronicus, Artaud, and a Theatre of Cannibalism
Prologue
For whatever Shakespeare wrote was meant from the start to be supplemented by an invisible
“paratext” consisting of words spoken by Shakespeare to the actors and by the actors to each
other concerning emphasis, stage business, tone, pacing, possible cuts, and so forth.
92

To the extent that this paratext was ever written down, it was recorded in the promptbook. . . .
[Oxford editors upon which this Norton text is based] choose the text immersed in history—that
is, in the theatrical embodiment for which it was intended by its author—over the text unstained
by the messy, collaborative demands of the playhouse. The closest we can get to Shakespeare’s
“final” version of a play performed by his company during his professional life—that is, during
the time in which he could still oversee and participate in any cuts and revisions . . .
“Writing” for the theatre, at least for Shakespeare, is not simply a matter of setting words to
paper and letting the pages drift away; it is a social process as well as an individual act. . . . Is
there a tension between the Oxford editors’ preference for the performed, fully socialized text
and their continued commitment to recovering the text as Shakespeare himself intended it? Yes.
The tension is most visible in their determination to strip away textual changes arising from
circumstances, such as government censorship, over which Shakespeare had no control.
(“We have, wherever possible,” they write, put “profanities back in Shakespeare’s mouth.”)
It can be glimpsed as well in the editors’ belief, almost a leap of faith, that there was little
revision of Shakespeare’s plays in his company’s revivals between the time of his death and the
publication of the Folio. But the tension is mainly a creative one.
Stephen Greenblatt (emphases mine, 76-77).
In Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Dream of the Master Text,” which is one of his three
introductions to the Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition (2008), the idea of the
93

“invisible paratext” and its connection to Shakespeare as a Reconstituted Author

exhibits much

92

The promptbook is the text that emerges from earlier drafts (fair and foul copies), which
makes its way to the Master of the Revels for approval. This text “belongs” to the theatre
company, in this instance, to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or the King’s Men.
93

Greenblatt argues that the notion of Shakespeare, as a singular author, must be reconceived
vis-à-vis the cultural practices that have gone into the production of “Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare must be many writers, performers, readers, practices of production and
consumption, et al. Such a concept further drives the cannibal’s appetite. Greenblatt only
157

of what this project maintains: The search for the Author(ized Text) is a desire to lose the self in
the Author who has been collided with a text that never existed in the first place and which must
be consumed, eaten in order to effect transubstantiation. Greenblatt wants to eat some
Shakespeare via his consumption of other Shakespeare texts (Quartos, Folios, the history of the
making of the Quartos and Folios, the history of the Oxford editing that went into the making of
the official, Oxford text), taking bits of one text, chopping the lines up or out, to get to a remastered text that does proper homage to the Master, the “real” Master who swears. The
historical Shakespeare is one in a steady state of consumption and reconstitution, but not with
Greenblatt (thank God).
Greenblatt’s paratextualized (asides) Shakespeare allows him, he hopes, to make a name
for himself. To reconstitute Shakespeare, to cannibalize Shakespeare includes the processes of
production and consumption of the text Shakespeare composed, as Shakespeare intended,
according to Greenblatt. Note that these social processes he articulates most poignantly refer to
writing, publishing, and owning, not reading, and perhaps to a slightly larger extent, the
performing, which he treats historically.
In other words, for Greenblatt the authorial figure of Shakespeare is a (dis)embodied one,
who speaks with many voices, all of which are in tension with each other. These other voices,
which include past ones, not unlike the Emperor’s past which manifests in a myriad of
(dis)embodied performances, collide and consume one another. The past processes that went into
the construction of a text collides with other versions of a text collides with an idea or ideas
about Shakespeare, and not unlike Mrs. Venable, it appears Greenblatt’s act of re-authorizing
Shakespeare is to put his own name in with Shakespeare’s. (In academia, that’s how you make a
reiterates the Author by reconstituting the notion to include more of his own newly
reconstituted self, with Shakespeare, and the rest.
158

name for yourself, off of someone else’s.) The creative tension that he refers to is a tension
between the paraleptical and the paratextual. Paratextually, Greenblatt includes himself with all
the other renditions of Shakespeare’s plays. Paraleptically, Greenblatt passes over the idea that
there is “a” Shakespeare in order to reemphasize that there is one, but only through him,
“Destroy the notion of the ‘Master Text,’ and I will show you the correct way to understand the
‘real’ Shakespeare.” The editors find themselves in a paradox of their own making, and the
tension this paradox offers insight as to how Titus achieves transubstantiation for Tamora: A reunion with her sacrificed and dismembered son, Alarbus.
Titus Andronicus Minces Meat and Words
TAMORA. . . . Thrice noble Titus, spare my firstborn son.
TITUS. Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me.
These are the brethren, whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously they ask a sacrifice.
To this your son is marked, and die he must
T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone.
from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 1.1.120-26.
........................................
SATURNINUS. What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?
TITUS. Killed her [Lavinia] for whom my tears have made me blind.
.......................................
SATURNINUS. What, was she ravished? Tell who did the deed.
TITUS. Will’t please you eat? Will’t please Your Highness
feed?
TAMORA. Why hast thou slain thine only daughter thus?
TITUS. Not I; ‘twas Chiron and Demetrius.
They ravished her and cut away her tongue,
And they, ‘twas they that did her all this wrong.

159

SATURNINUS. Go fetch them hither to us presently.
TITUS. Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
‘Tis true, ‘tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point.
(5.3.48-49, 53-63)
I cannot help but laugh during the exchange among Titus, Tamora, and Saturninus while
Titus serves his guests some people-pie at the end of the play. Perhaps in this proto-play of
Shakespeare’s,

94

cannibalism’s power might reveal itself more clearly, as the “rigid rhetoric”

and Marcus’s over-the-top monologues,

96

95

and the two-dimensionality of the characters preclude

the master’s genius from shining through the page.

97

We will not be disturbed by the “serious”

tragic conventions found in Othello’s Song, for example, with the more elevated, high-poetry
kinds of verse. The play is just too straight-forward and inelegant to be from Shakespeare. Rather
than Othello’s beautiful use of anaphora:
94

Riverside Shakespeare claims Titus Andronicus is “the earliest of Shakespeare’s tragedies”
(1065). Other scholars, such as Sylvan Barnet, claim it is one of his first, with The Comedy of
Errors being his first. Scholars note Titus’s speeches serve as the first draft of later speeches
heard from Brutus or Marc Antony, for example.
95

Riverside Shakespeare, 1068.

96

For example, after seeing Lavinia for the first time after Tamora’s sons Demetrius and Chiron
rape and dismember her, Marcus’s infamous monologue in response is seen as extremely
verbose and long-winded and unnecessary. Typically, this speech is altered, condensed, or cut
entirely from productions. See Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Dream of the Master Text” for
further elaboration on this topic.

97

Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (1598), which is the source for knowing of the
lost plays Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won, indicates, along with 1590’s theatre owner Philip
Henslowe’s assessment of the plays he produced, that the (1592-1594) play was popular. Meres
writes, “. . . for tragedy, [witness] his Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth,
King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet”(Bryson 129). Despite its vast popularity
during Shakespeare’s lifetime, Titus has a long history of derision and judgment. T.S. Eliot
famously called the play “uninspired” and “filth.” George Bernard Shaw indicated that the play
is so bad that Shakespeare could not possibly have written it. George Peele may have helped
with the construction of the text, which must explain why the play is so terrible.
160

Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hairbreadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery . . .
(1.3.137-40)
Not to mention the enjambment, alliteration, and assonance in these lines alone, note Titus’s use
of anaphora, which has a much blunter performative quality:
I am not mad; I know thee well enough.
Witness this wretched stump, witness these crimson
lines,
Witness these trenches made by grief and care,
Witness the tiring day and heavy night,
Witness all sorrow, that I know thee well
For our proud empress, mighty Tamora.
Is not thy coming for my other hand?
“Of being” done things to, Othello is put upon by others. He is not the acting agent in that
instance of being taken into slavery, for example. Paratextually, Othello adds and subtracts and
hones his narrative to persuade the Venetian city-patriarchs. To “Witness” sorrow and a tiring
day, Titus distances Tamora from the events at hand: She is about to eat her children.
Paraleptically, Titus’s “other hand” passes over the smell just under her nose. Othello does not
command. He reflects. Titus commands, and he does so as a soldier does, with a staccato
delivery. Othello, a general too, adopts a more scholarly, poetic, sonnet-like persona via his
speech. Titus’s rhyming is more repetitive than poetic. The language does not employ rhetorical
devices to the extent Othello’s speech does. This project contends that the text and the body are
the same. If this is the case, then the violence Chiron and Demetrius visit upon Lavinia, that
Titus visits upon Chiron and Demetrius, that Titus visits upon Tamora and Saturninus, is as
much a violence of language, then, as it is to the body. Note Titus’s paraleptical retort after
killing his daughter Lavinia.

161

It produces an absurd, laughable reaction; and, Titus’s rhyme scheme makes my
chuckling all the more gregarious. Maybe it is the bizarre manner in which Titus acts, wearing a
cook’s outfit, all the better “[t]o entertain Your Highness [Saturninus] and your empress
98

[Tamora]” with (Titus, 5.3.32). More than anything, it is the paraleptical response

he gives to

Saturninus that focuses my laughter. “What happened to Lavinia to elicit such an act, slitting
your own daughter’s throat?” “Anyone want some more pie?” The pie becomes the emphasis,
and for the characters, it seems Titus has gone quite mad, not because he killed his daughter, but
rather, because he does not directly answer Saturninus’s question. “How dare you kill your own
daughter and not explain yourself afterwards; what a faux pas.”
In Act One, Titus’s men’s religiously asking for revenge transforms into a ritualized
religious ceremony at the opening of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The Goths have killed
sons of Rome. Balance, payment must be made in blood “t’appease their [the slain’s] groaning
shadows that are gone.” The shadows groan while being gone? These disembodied and a-figured
(there is no figure, but merely a shadow) guttural expressions appear to haunt Titus, so much so
that Titus speaks of them as if they apply to everyone there, despite the silence he boasts of his
family’s tomb, his “[s]weet cell of virtue and nobility” (1.1.93): “here are no storms,/No noise,
but silence and eternal sleep” (1.1.154-55). The eternal sleep, the so-called silence Titus refers to
is for him honor; one no longer has to bother with it, as it is silently secured in death.
Only true servants of Rome reside within the tomb. After Titus commits infanticide,
killing his son Mutius who refused to allow Emperor Saturninus to marry his (Mutius’s) sister

98

Curiously, in Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), Titus does not speak the line “Will’t please you
eat?” immediately after Satruninus’s question. The paralepsis does not occur. The film’s focus
shifts away from the pies and onto an overtly didactic epilogue Taymor included, which
parallels her prologue, both of which are additions to the First Folio script.
162

Lavinia, he bars his other sons from burying Mutius in the tomb because he has “dishonored all
our family . . ./Traitors, away! He rests not in this tomb . . . Bury him where you can, he comes
not here” (1.1.343, 350, 355). The noise that might disrupt the repose of the tomb is betrayal.
The noise of betrayal gets conflated with the noise of revenge. The two are interchangeable,
unidentifiable (the noise has no “real” source); they eat each other, as Titus and Tamora nibble
away at each other’s families, piece by piece.
Metonymic gestures do not prevail here. Titus’s severed hand is not synecdoche, and its
chopping is all the more absurd for it:
AARON. Titus Andronicus, [Saturninus] my lord the Emperor
Sends thee this word: that if thou love thy sons,
Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus,
Or any of you, chop off your hand
And send it to the King. He for the same
Will send thee hither both thy sons alive,
And that shall be the ransom for their fault.
TITUS. . . . With all my heart I’ll send the Emperor my hand.
Good Aaron, wilt thou help chop it off?
LUCIUS. Stay, father, for that noble hand of thine,
...........
Shall not be sent. My hand will serve the turn.
...........
MARCUS. . . . . . . .
My hand hath been but idle; let it serve
To ransom my two nephews from their death.
...........
My hand shall go.
LUCIUS. By heaven, it shall not go!
..................
TITUS. Agree between you. I will spare my hand.
LUCIUS. Then I’ll go fetch an ax.
163

MARCUS. But I will use the ax.
Exeunt Lucius and Marcus
TITUS. Come hither, Aaron. I’ll deceive them both.
Lend me thy hand, and I will give thee mine.
AARON. (aside) If that be called deceit, I will be honest.
(3.1.150-185)
The stichomythic exchange draws attention to Aaron’s last remark, a punchline, an aside. This
kind of paratextual remark reflects back onto Titus’s paraleptic reply. When Titus refers to
Lavinia through the legend of Philomel, this is not just a metaphorical allusion; it is a not just a
metonymic one.
Titus adopts a rather paraleptical way of behaving; from the chopping off of his own
hand to his feigned madness that begins at the end of Act 4, Titus shifts the focus of the matter
away from the issue at hand, pun intended. As the madness focuses the characters’ attention
away from the meat pies in Act 5, so does the severing of his hand direct Marcus’s and Lucius’s
attention towards the search for an ax.
The tension between passing over (paralepsis) and re-emphasizing to re-constitute
(paratextuality) resolves in the cannibalization of Chiron and Demetrius. Paraleptically, he saves
his sons by chopping off his hand, and paratextually, he re-emphasizes his daughter’s innocence.
Titus does not mimetically enforce a punishment akin to Lavinia’s rape and disfigurement, nor is
cannibalizing one’s own children necessarily an amplified version of her traumatic experience.
Titus paraleptically emphasizes the fate of the characters in Acts 4 and 5; he
paratextualizes Demetrius, Chiron, Saturninus and especially, Tamora. Titus Andronicus is a
paratextual play and paraleptical play, in a persistent tension throughout draws attention to that
which is being consumed: The play itself. The cultural conventions to which everyone appeals,

164

i.e., honor can only be maintained with the spilling of someone else’s blood, which obfuscates
the activity that occurs meta-textually. The play eats itself.
Cultural conventions dictate blood be spilt, after all. Lucius states, “Give us the proudest
99

prisoner of the Goths,/That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile/Ad manes fratrum

sacrifice

his flesh/Before this earthy prison of their bones,/That so the shadows be not unappeased”
(1.1.96-100). Alarbus’s blood sacrifice must occur in order to redeem the Romans’ fallen
brethren: “T’appease their groaning shadows.” The blood, then, shuts them up, in other words.
Lucius confirms their appeasement:
See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites. Alarbus’s limbs are lopped,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky.
Remaineth naught but to inter our brethren
And with loud ‘larums welcome them to Rome. (1.1.142-47)
This affirmation is a late addition to the script that comes from the First Folio (1623), which
comes from Quarto Three, which transcribes Quarto Two, which many Shakespearean scholars
claim as a “bad” quarto. The now-official text comes from the discovery of Quarto One in the
early twentieth century, which appears to be closer to the prompt text that the Master of the
Revels approves prior to the play’s first performance. This declaration, then, apparently needed
to be included as the play evolved because Alarbus’s dismemberment did not come across with
the sounds of Tamora’s unearthly, nearly disassociated or disembodied screams. It is as if it is
her ancestors, or some primal force, some uncivilized, guttural expression takes control of her
body, yet, that possession of sorts must be illuminated by linguistic articulation. It is as if the
words somehow will represent more powerfully than the inexpressible, understood through her
screams.
99

To the Departed Spirits of our brothers.
165

However, these spirits, someone’s spirits, these screams do not shut up. So, maybe, the
words will do the trick. The screams may hush, but they are not silenced. These screams which
emanate from the violence Andronicus inflicts upon Tamora’s first sons hush, but they are not
silenced and are, instead, eventually transubstantiated via the cannibalization of her own
children. Her guttural moans turn back inwards upon the chewed, material bodies of her two
sons. J.D. Palmer indicates that it is the excesses of violence which prove Shakespeare’s attempts
to stretch the limits of the “material” at hand (320), attempts that may or may not fail. The
unheard, but referenced, groans proliferate exponentially throughout the play, as Tamora
continuously hears Alarbus’s hacked limbs speak the tune of revenge of her own echoed, ghosted
scream in her ear. Thus, she demands that her two sons, Chiron and Demetrius, not to forget her
cries and their brother’s:
Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain
To save your brother from the sacrifice,
But fierce Andronicus would not relent.
Therefore away with her, and use her as you will—
The worse to her, the better loved me. (2.3.163-167)
Rather than a metonymic or ghost-like limb appearing before her eyes

100

with a wagging finger

of disapproval, “Shame on you mother for letting them put my guts on a fire—they do smell
good, though—Make them hear me through you!” Alarbus transubstantiates via Tamora’s
chewing.
Since Titus, like all of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies, stems from the Senecan revenge
formula, let us evoke Seneca’s own words on the matter, “An act is not revenged unless it is
surpassed.” Transubstantiation does not occur because the taboo of cannibalism exceeds all
others, per se; cannibalism becomes the means by which Tamora rejoins her son. Revenge stops
100

In Taymor’s film adaptation, she literalizes what she sees as metonymic: Six-foot large,
hacked-off limbs proliferate the film, as sculpture, perhaps.
166

at this moment, granted everyone is dead, but, rather than the more familiar Senecan ending in
other Shakespearean tragedies, the play does not portend a story of resolution that continues on
after the play is over. For example, in Hamlet, Fortinbras takes over the dysfunctional house in
Denmark, which Horatio announces at the end of the play. There is always a herald or chorus
member who speaks on behalf of the audience, back to the audience, which assures from this
kind of formulaic move, catharsis might occur at the end. Titus does not offer such relief.
The last lines of the play, Lucius’s monologue, do not offer catharsis:
Some loving friends convey the Emperor hence,
And give him burial in his father’s grave.
My father and Lavinia shall forthwith
Be closèd in our housefhold’s monument.
As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial;
But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey.
Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,
And being dead, let birds on her take pity. (5.3.191-200)
Unlike the promise of peace Fortinbras brings, at the expense of Denmark’s sovereignty, the
peace Lucius appears to find is in the supposed further, excessive degradation of Tamora’s body,
an act not unlike Achilles’s attempt to punish Hector in The Iliad by dragging Hector’s dead
body around Troy’s walls. Lucius decrees such an insult is a more excessive act than eating
one’s own children. It is as if once the body is gone, her presence goes with it. It is as if the
absence of the body’s matter matters at this point. Cannibalization precludes Tamora’s absence,
as her kin are now reconstituted, not just with Tamora, but with the city as well. The paratextual
nature of her eating Chiron and Demetrius echoes the paratextuality of Greenblatt’s fascination
with Shakespeare mirrors a new kind of theatrical language for theatre. It is the language of the
cannibal. It is the language of paralepsis and the paratextual.

167

The Cannibal, Artaud, and Para-leptical/textual Eating
For the theatre, cannibalism reveals itself in its absent presence; the theatre reveals itself
to be that where there was “nothing” there to begin with. Titus’s words re-constitute the flesh of
Tamora’s sons in her mouth, not in her mouth, in her throat, now in her belly. Gone. But (t)here.
“You’re eating your sons.” The saying is the (un/re)doing; the saying that does, does via these
two rhetorical devices, paralespsis and paratextuality, which cannibalize each other in the
overlapping that occurs.
Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer, like Tamora’s sons, transubstantiates; he does so
through Catherine’s talking, a paratextual, reconstituting kind of talking which continuously
cannibalizes vis-à-vis Dr. Sugar’s, Mrs. Venable’s, and even Catherine’s interruptions.
Interruptions which are not always heard.
In Sarah Kane’s Blasted, for example, the “Author’s Note” directs that certain
grammatical symbols signify certain activities, moods, tones, etc. The “/” indicates overlapping,
interrupting dialogue between characters, like Ian and Cate. The “/” never appears in the 2001,
authorized and official copy of the play. In his “Editor’s Note,” David Greig, Kane’s friend and
fellow playwright, presents the play as that at least. In this indisputable version of the play, the
absent “/” becomes more present in its absence. Blasted’s use (or not) of grammatical symbols
results in an activity that eats itself, and Ian’s consumption of the dead baby at the end of the
play serves as a sign of this activity’s nature: It is cannibalistic. By exciting signification to its
maximum capacities, instead of writing a new kind of visual code, Blasted un-writes ones
pertaining to linguistic signs. The “Author’s Note” that precedes the script of the play recodes
and ultimately reconstitutes the play. The code formerly known as a mark in textual space, the
unspeakable, becomes a code of space, i.e., the performance on the stage.

168

The performance of David Greig’s “Editor’s Note” on the page enacts a paratextual
cannibalism, in that, as an aside, placed in between the “Author’s Note” and the script of the
play, it is the thing that signals itself as “not that important.” However, rather than
deemphasizing itself, it reconstitutes itself into the play Blasted.
In Greig’s San Diego, it is as if it is almost aware of this point: The play includes at least
five little-David-Greig’s, characters which attempt to de-authorize the status of the play as
authorial, i.e., the status of Greig as Author, (de)emphasized, in the play, and in Blasted. The
play succeeds. The characters cannibalize each other; each version of David Greig pushes itself
in/onto the other.
The Emperor’s other, his Architect, or so the Emperor labels him, is a version of the
Emperor, or so he hopes. The Architect seems to be on board with this plan, at least from time to
time, as he begs to trade places with the Emperor, to act as he is commanded. The Emperor
hopes to enact his interpretation of the Architect’s interpretation of what the Emperor commands
the Architect to do before the Architect is able. For example, after commanding him to “be a
donkey,” the Emperor interrupts the Architect, over and over again, to the extent that, in the end,
he begins to perform his interpretation of what he thinks the Architect’s interpretation of what a
performance might look like of being a donkey. The Emperor, through this performance of
interrupting, speaking the act, “EEEHAAAwwwww,” enacts the act…it does not precede it. The
saying is the re-constituting, hoping to at least, the Architect with the Emperor.
Transubstantiation occurs only when the Architect cannibalizes the Emperor…or, does he?
The absent consumption of the Emperor paraleptically paratextualizes, that is, it eats, and
its eating makes this project’s point (There is no difference between the actual and
representation) Both ideas eat each other. When the Emperor appears from under the table that

169

the Architect just sopped up his (the Emperor’s) remains from, with a meaty morsel or two, the
notion of cause and effect, and, effect, then, cause (what Frederick Jameson headlines as the
“Postmodern”) no longer matters. The matter of the Emperor, hop-hop-hopping out from under
room-service’s table, after the Architect ate him, a supposed reconstitution of the two characters,
the Emperor pops out from under a tablecloth.
Cannibalism, on the st/page, enacts a Theatre of Cannibalism, which pleases our newly
dismembered and consumed Artaud vis-à-vis The Theatre and Its Double vis-à-vis this project.
The constant need to reinvoke the nothing, and reinitiate the cannibalism that is “never there”
enacts the conflation of both absent body and absent art, both present symbol and performative
presence. The threat of death, alleviated, the imaginary joinder of anthropophagy lends the
delusion I never had in the first place. “Eat Me.”

170

BIBLIOGRAPHY

171

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arens, W. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979.
Arrabal, Fernando. The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. Guernica and Other Plays. Trans.
Evererard D’Harnoncourt and Adele Shank. NY: Grove Press. 1994.
Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Anthology. Ed. Jack Hirschman. San Francisco: City Light
Books, 1965.
-- -- --. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. NY:
Grove Press, 1958.
Askenasy, Hans. Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
1994.
Aston, Elaine. “Reviewing the Fabric of Blasted.” Sarah Kane in Context. Ed. Laurens De Vos
and Graham Saunders. Manchester University Press, 2010.
Auslander. Philip. “Liveness: Performance and the Anxiety of Simulation.” Performance and
Cultural Politics. Ed. Elin Diamond. London: Routledge, 1996.
Avigail, Shoshana and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. “What Do Brook’s Bricks Mean? Toward
a Theory of the ‘Mobility’ of Objects in Theatrical Discourse.”
Poetics Today. 2 (1981): 13-34.
Avramescu, Catalin. Cannibalism: An Intellectual History. Trans. Alistair Ian Blyth. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
Baker-White, Robert. The Text in Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modern Drama.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999.
Barnes, Clive. Review of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, by Fernando Arrabal. The
New York Times Sunday, May 30, 1976.
Barker, Francis, ed., et al. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1972.

-- -- --. Image—Music—Text. “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.” Trans. Stephen Heath.
NY: Hill and Wang. 1977.
172

-- -- --. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
-- -- --. “Flat-out Vision.” Performance and Cultural Politics. Ed. Elin Diamond. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Blurton, Heather. Cannibalism in High Medieval Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Boehmer, Elleke. “Eating (dis)order: From Metaphoric Cannibalism to Cannibalistic
Metaphors.” J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory. Ed. Katy Iddiols, et al. London:
Continuum, 2009.
Bond, Edward. Early Morning. Plays: One. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977.
Boyer, Allen D. “Drama, Law, and Rhetoric in the Age of Coke and Shakepeare.” The Law in
Shakespeare. Ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.
Brennan, Teresa. History After Lacan. Routledge, 1993.
Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare: The Illustrated and Updated Edition. NY: Atlas Books-Harper
Collins, 2009.
Buchan, Mark. “Food for Thought.” Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of
Cultural Identity. Ed. Kristen Guest. Forward. Maggie Kilgour. Albany: State University
of NY Press, 2001.
Buse, Peter. Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama. Manchester
University Press, 2002.
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine. University of Michigan,
2003.
-- -- --. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1996.
-- -- --. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks
to the Present. Expanded Edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Cavendish, Dominic. “Review of San Diego.” The Telegraph. 18 August 2003.
Chadwich, Henry. The Early Church. Revised Edition. Penguin Books, 1993.

173

chicagotheatre. <chicagotheatre.com>
Christensen, Matthew J. “Cannibals in the Postcolony: Sierra Leone’s Intersecting Hegemonies
in Charlie Haffner’s Slave Revolt Drama Amistad Kata-Kata.” Research in African
Literatures. 36.1 (Spring 2005): 1-19.
Columbus, Christopher. Select Letters of Christopher Columbus. Ed. Richard Henry Major.
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Constantine, Nathan. A History of Cannibalism: From Ancient Cultures to Survival Stories and
Modern Psychopaths. Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, Inc., 2006.
Covino, Deborah Caslav. Amending the Abject: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and
Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004.
Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington.
Wadsworth Publishing, 1975.
Davies, Reginald Thorne, ed. The Corpus Christi Play of the English Middle Ages. New Jersey:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
Derrida, Jacques. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play
of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang
Iser. NY: Columbia University Press, 1989.
-- -- --. Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988.
-- -- --. “The Theatre of Cruelty: The Closure of Representation.” Writing and
Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
-- -- --. “The Voice That Keeps Silence.” Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Northwestern University Press,
1973.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Reissued Third Edition. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Dox, Donnalee. “Medieval Drama as Documentation: ‘Real Presence’ in the Croxton
Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blissed Sacrament.” Theatre
Survey 38 (1997): 97-115.
Dunn, Geoffrey. Tertullian. London: Routledge, 2004.
Edgar, David. Introduction. State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting. Ed. David Edgar. Faber
and Faber, 1999.
174

Ehrman, B.D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew. NY:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Ellis, Lorena Balensifer. “In the Jungle of the ‘Antropófagos.’” Modern Drama. 42.1 (1999):
269-279.
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Pygmalion’s No-Body and the Body of Dance.” Performance and Cultural
Politics. Ed. Elin Diamond. London: Routledge, 1996.
Garner, Jr., Stanton B. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary
Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Georgia Straight: Vancouver’s Online Source. <https://www.straight.com>
Goldstein, David B. “The Cook and the Cannibal: Titus Andronicus and the New World.”
Shakespeare Studies. 37 (2009): 99-133.
Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Dream of the Master Text.” The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the
Oxford Edition. 2nd Edition. Ed. Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman
Maus. NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008.
Greig, David. Introduction to Sarah Kane: Complete Plays. London: Menthuen, 2001.
-- -- --. San Diego. NY: Faber and Faber. 2003.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1994.
Guest, Kristen. “Introduction.” Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of
Cultural Identity. Ed. Kristen Guest. Foreward. Maggie Kilgour. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2001.
Hardison, O.B. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin
and Early History of Modern Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
Harrill, J. Albert. “Cannibalistic Language in the Fourth Gospel and Greco-Roman Polemics
of Factionalism.” Journal of Biblical Literature. 127.1 (Spring 2008): 133-158.
Hawes, Charlie, Daniel Korn, and Mark Radice. Cannibal: The History of the People-Eaters.
Channel 4 Publishing, 2002.
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. NY: Penguin Books, 1991.

175

Hook, Brian S. “Oedipus and Thyestes Among the Philosophers: Incest and Cannibalism in
Plato, Diogenes, and Zeno.” Classical Philology. 100.1 (Jan 2005): 17-40.
Ives, Peter. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt
School. Toronto: UP Toronto. 2004.
Intellect Books. <http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/page/index,name=about/>
Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998.
Jones, Lois. Cannibal: The True Story of the Maneater of Rotenburg. Berkeley Publishing
Company-Penguin Group, 2005.
Kane, Sarah. Complete Plays. Intro. David Greig. London: Methuen, 2001.
Kilgour, Maggie, ed. Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity.
Albany: State University of NY Press, 2001.
-- -- --. From Communion to Cannibalism. Princeton University Press, 1990.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia
University Press, 1982.
-- -- --. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, 1984.
Kubiak, Anthony. Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Lindenbaum, Shirley. “Thinking About Cannibalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 33
(2004): 475-498.
Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei. The Cannibal Banquet: Violence, Enactment, Tragedy in the
English Renaissance. Diss. Harvard University, 1993.
Margaroni, Maria. “‘The Lost Foundation’: Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora and Its Ambiguous
Legacy.” Hypatia 20.1 (2005): 78-98.
Mauro, Lucia. Review of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, by Fernando Arrabal.
chicagotheater.com <http://www.chicagotheater.com/revArchEmp.html>
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul. 1962.
Metz, Christian. “Aural Objects.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): web.

176

Mills, Liz. “When the Voice Itself is the Image.” Modern Drama. University of Toronto Press.
52.4 (2009): web.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Trans. Charles Cotton. Ed. William
Carew. Project Gutenberg. Web.
Moshy, Summer Neilson. The Empty Center: Acting Out Theatric Alliance in Three Texts by
Sarah Kane. Diss. The University of California, San Diego and Irvine, 2008.
Norman, Lance. “Metatheatrically Speaking: Dismembering Sights and Classical Messages.”
Dismemberment in Drama/Dismemberment of Drama. Ed. Lance Norman. Cambridge
Scholars, 2008.
O’Dell, Kathy. “Fluxus Feminus.” TDR 41.1 (Spring 1997): 43-60.
Ohi, Kevin. “Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and the Scene of Analysis in
Suddenly, Last Summer.” Cinema Journal. 38.3 (1999).
Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” Beyond
Representation, Power and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, et al. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992.
Palmer, J.D. “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus
Andronicus.” Critical Quarterly. 14 (1972): 320-339.
Pankrantz, Annette. “Neither Here Nor There: Theatrical Space in Kane’s Work.” Sarah Kane in
Context. Ed. Lauren de Vos and Graham Saunders. Manchester University Press, 2011.
Parilla, Catherine Arturi. A Theory for Reading Dramatic Texts. NY: Peter Lang, 1995.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Pinter, Harold. Interview with Hallam Tennyson, Aug. 7, 1960. Martin Esslin. The Theatre of
the Absurd. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
Plato. Timaeus. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968.
Rasmussen, Eric. The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. NY: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
Rayner, Alice. “Presenting Objects, Presenting Things.” Staging Philosophy: Intersections of
Theater, Performance, and Philosophy. Ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz.
University of Michigan Press, 2009.
177

-- -- --. To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action.
University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Read, Piers Paul. Alive. NY: Harper-Perennial, 1974.
Rice, Raymond J. “Cannibalism and the Act of Revenge in Tudor-Stuart Drama.” Studies in
English Literature. 44.2 (Spring 2004): 297-316.
Rodosthenous, George. “‘I Let the Language Lead the Dance’: Politics, Musicality, and
Voyeurism.” New Theatre Quarterly. 27 (Feb 2011): 3-13.
Roof, Judith. Pinter Et Cetera. Ed. Craig N. Owens. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2009.
Saddick, Annette J. “The (Un)Represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee
Williams’s ‘Desire and the Black Maseur’ and Suddenly, Last Summer. Modern
Drama 41:3 1998.
Sagan, Eli. Human Aggression and Cultural Form. NY: Harper and Row, 1974.
Sagnon, Eric W. “Theater Blows [Coups de théâter].” Trans. Craig N. Owens. Dismemberment
in Drama/Dismemberment of Drama. Ed. Lance Norman. Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Saunders, Graham. ‘Love me, or kill me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes.
Manchester University Press, 2002.
--

--

--. “‘Out Vile Jelly’: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear.
New Theatre Quarterly. 20.1. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University
Press, 1985.
Schechner, Richard. “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance.” Drama Review. 17.3
(Sept. 1973): 9
-- -- --. Between Theater and Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press,
1985.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. NY: Routledge, 1998.
Shakespeare, William. Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann
178

Thompson, David Scott Kastan. Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1998.
-- -- --. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich. 1972.
-- -- --. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1997.
-- -- --. Titus Andronicus. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Ed. David
Bevington. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2009.
-- -- --. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Skeggs, Beverly. “The Making of Class and Gender Through Visualizing Moral Subject
Formation.” Sociology 39.5 (2005): 965-82.
Staniforth, Maxwell. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. Revised Edition.
Penguin Books, 1987.
Steinsemble: A Performance Group. Web. Jan. 2012.
Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the
Renaissance to the Victorians. NY: Routledge, 2012.
Svich, Caridad. “Physical Poetry: David Greig in Conversation with Caridad Svich.” PAJ: A
Journal of Performance and Art. 29.2 (May 2007): 51-58.
Sofer, Andrew. “Self-consuming artifacts: Power, performance and the body in Tennessee
Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.” Modern Drama 38.3 (Fall 1998).
theatreSCOTLAND. <theatrescotland.com>
Thomas, Colin. “Review of San Diego.” Straight.com. 13 October 2005.
Travis-Henikoff, Carole. Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest
Taboo. Santa Monica Press, 2008.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Publications,
2001.
Urban, Ken. “An Ethics of Catastrophe.” PAJ 69 (2001): 56-66.
Veltruský, Jiri. Drama as Literature. Lisse: The Peter De Ridder Press, 1977.
--

---. “Man and Object in the Theatre.” A Prague School Reader on Esthetics,
Literary Studies, and Style. American University Language Center, 1958.
179

Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. NY: Fordham University Press, 2004.
Williams, Tennessee. Suddenly, Last Summer. Tennessee Williams: Four Plays. Signet Classic,
1978.
Wixson, Christopher. “‘In Better Places’: Space, Identity, and Alienation in Sarah Kane’s
Blasted.” Comparative Drama 39.1 (Spring 2005): web.

180