WARNING: This is quite a lengthy one!
(Please note that a fuller bibliography for the article below is on the 'Bit and Biblio' page of this site.)
What Is Total
Revolt?
I have been giving thought to ‘revolt’ – and
especially to ‘total revolt’ – since re-reading Robert Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt, which was published
way back in 1964, incorporating material that he had written in the late 1950s.
Brustein (b. 1927) is the doyen of American ‘highbrow’ theatre critics and
dramaturgs. Re-reading a book now perhaps thought dated because of its
germination in the theatrical excitement of several decades ago is to
experience a blast of fresh air from the past.
Theatre of Revolt’s premise is that nine of the greatest dramatists
and exponents or founder-members of the modern as distinct from the classical
theatre – Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Shaw, Pirandello, O’Neill, Brecht, Artaud
and Genet – that is to say, nearly all of them, are protagonists of an
all-round, or total revolt; that it is, indeed, ‘revolt’ which characterises
the modern drama in general, including the greater and lesser dramaturgical
exponents. The old theatre was a theatre
of ‘communion’ (my own term for it is a ‘theatre of affirmation’); the modern
theatre is – or was when Brustein was writing, according to him - a ‘theatre of
revolt’.
In drama terms, the period background for this book
covers the ‘angry young man’ phenomenon, notable for the theatrical
‘revolution’ launched in that year of Suez, 1956, with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, swiftly followed by
a veritable explosion across British theatre and cinema which, incidentally,
included a few angry young women – Pinter, Wesker, Delaney, Jellicoe, Arden,
Rudkin, Wood, Behan, not to speak of that tragically overlooked precursor John
Whiting; film dramatisations of Sillitoe, Braine, Kingsley Amis and so on.
Brustein was writing at a time when the world impact of Beckett, as well as of
Ionesco and others characterised by the late Martin Esslin as ‘the theatre of
the absurd’, the momentous visit to London in the mid 1950s of Brecht’s
Berliner Ensemble marking the advent in the West of ‘epic theatre’, plus Albee,
Kopit, Gelber and others from across the Atlantic, were all in evidence, while
the Eastern European drama of Gombrowicz, Mrozek and Havel was beginning to be
noticed outside the confines of the Soviet ‘satellite’ countries. It was a
period when the cinema of Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Antonioni and the
French nouvelle vague was reaching a wide Anglo-Saxon audience – a great
time to be alive and young and theatregoing and cinemagoing, as I recall. But
Brustein has his mind not on all this (except for his frequent citings of
Beckett and Ionesco) but on what he apparently considers the central thrust of
the whole movement as embodied in his nine chosen subjects.
The philosophical
background for this book is one in which French Existentialism was fashionable
still; when Structuralism, not to speak of the later Poststructuralism or Postmodernism,
had scarcely been heard of outside certain Parisian circles (except that the
first was already being disseminated indirectly through the anthropology of
Lévi-Strauss and to some extent in the writings of Lucien Goldmann). It was a
time – around 1960 - when Sartre could write plausibly of Marxism and
Existentialism as being the two interacting philosophical trajectories of the
day, and anyone who was not an Oxford linguistic analyst had to pay court to
Existentialism one way or another, including the theologians Barth and Tillich.
All this seems very remote from the intellectual scene fifty-odd years later in
the 21st century, whether in France or elsewhere, since Marxism –
seemingly on the verge of an intellectual hegemonic triumph by the early 1970s
- subsequently, it seemed, went with the formerly militant Western working
class into semi-eclipse (as ‘post Marxism’) while Existentialism is heard of no
more. Nevertheless, the fundamental writings informing Existentialism are as
inspirational and as avidly read and analysed as ever: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger. The last two were claimed for Postmodernism as well. As,
indeed, was Marx to some extent, at least by such as Foucault and Derrida. (Sartre, it should be recalled, could not –
at great length - leave old Marx alone, either.)
Brustein’s
writing, though not on the same intellectual level as these philosophers and
not intended to be so, remains stimulating, in its own way, from across the
years. From sources in practising journalism and teaching as well as in dramaturgy,
his treatment of ideas is lucid and without academic ponderousness. He breaks
down ‘revolt’ into three phases: ‘messianic,’ ‘social’ and ‘existential’. The
first phase, the ‘messianic’, is the one in which the playwright in question
renounces God (or declares Him dead) and sets himself up, rebelliously and
Lucifer-like, as ‘overman’ in God’s place, as man, artist and prophet. This is a phase very much influenced by the
protean Nietzsche, fairly obviously, and in particular by Thus Spake Zarathustra. It represents the playwright as militant
seer, at any rate the drama, with a prophetic voice like a ‘cry in the
wilderness’. The second phase is one of ‘social’ revolt: this turns the
searchlight on community and society by way of searing critique, with even a
revolutionist or at any rate socially subversive tone. The third phase is
‘existential’, the dying phase of the ‘theatre of revolt’: this posits, with a
certain weariness, a total absurdity in human existence with despairing and
tragic overtones.
Lucifer has failed, in the end. The ‘phases’ have come full circle. The
messianic had also implications for a mankind situated in the universe, but trumpeting
a message of defiance and ultimate triumph for the new world of new beings to
supersede the old, as presaged by the dramatist and his plays. Passing through
the social, the cycle returns once more to cosmological implications, but this
time the message is one of utter futility and despair.
Brustein
makes no attempt to fashion these phases as appearing in an invariable
chronological order (they are much too fluid and interacting for that), and the
only dramatist who fits all three of them in such an order more or less to
perfection is Henrik Ibsen, with August Strindberg a close second. Chekov never
goes through a ‘messianic’ phase at all: his compass is confined to the
‘social’ and (at any rate implicitly) the ‘existential’. Brustein is right to suggest
that Chekov was not as ‘objectively realist’ as he claimed to be, ordering his
plays within a moral perspective of his own. At the same time it is difficult
to make out any sort of case for Chekov as a rebel, and although his
tragi-comedies indicate social developments in the Russia of the time, they
cannot be said to be manifestations of any sort of ‘social revolt’ on Chekov’s
part. Dr Chekov the diagnosing physician was uninterested in abstract ideas and
in political programmes, revolutionary or otherwise.
Brustein’s
case for several others is at best tenuous. He could not quite come to terms
with Pirandello’s crypto-fascism and overt support for Mussolini. His portrayal
of the genial and garrulous Shaw as in a state of ‘revolt’ also begs a few questions.
Shaw’s political position evolved into a curious amalgam of (rather dated)
gradualist and benign socialism with inclinations towards ‘strong man’
adoration (which unfortunately never dates). Brustein’s argumentation is forced
to dwell on Heartbreak House (when
the war-weary Shaw finally lost his cool) and on Back to Methuselah (an interminable drama in the ‘messianic mode’)
– neither play representing Shaw at his best. And on Man and Superman (which indeed is
Shaw at his best, but as a dazzling comedy of manners it hardly seems to
represent a dramatist in revolt, even as it punctures the pompous certainties
of the male half of human society). As for the rest, Brustein admits that Shaw
is writing mainly for entertainment with a little argumentation here and there,
like grit for the pearl. Brustein’s
treatment of Brecht is, I think, vitiated by his Cold War ignorance of and
one-sided approach to Marxist dialectic, so that he is quite unable to give an
accurate account of Brecht’s aesthetics as they are informed by his
revolutionary socialist ethos, though the pre-Marxist plays are focused on with
interest (Brustein either ignores or is unaware of the major and enduring
Marxist aesthetic confrontation of Brecht and Lukacs.) Brustein fails most
consistently with O’Neill, whose large oeuvre is almost entirely dismissed
except for the two late plays, The Ice
Man Cometh and Long Day’s Journey
Into Night, because only these fit into Brustein’s grand scheme for
O’Neill’s inclusion in the pantheon.
(One feels it may have been thought necessary to get an American in
there somewhere.) The only ones who
satisfactorily fill Brustein’s bill are Ibsen, Strindberg, Artaud and Genet:
all undoubtedly turbulent – in at least two cases to the point of severe mental
disorder – and all undoubtedly subversive rebels in their bones to the end.
Ibsen
is the grand old man of total revolt, and it is Brustein’s chapter on Ibsen
that I – seeking to find out what Brustein thought total revolt was – believe
to be the most illuminating. Ibsen (whom MC Bradbrook thought was one of the
two greatest writers of the 19th century – the other being Tolstoy –
and I agree with her despite the steep competition) was against everything. His concept of ‘revolt’ was
total, implacable, and consistent to the end, seeking and finding successive
means – ‘messianic’, ‘social’ and ‘existential’ – to express it according to
these various phases in his artistic development. When remarking that the only
true revolution was the Flood, Ibsen noted that even the Flood had survivors in
Noah’s Ark. His response: ‘I would torpedo
the ark!’ It is grand, ferocious, and
total. We misread Ibsen if we imagine that his ‘social’ plays were dramas
advocating reform (thus so highly and mistakenly esteemed by Shaw, amongst
others). Ibsen’s vision was cast far beyond his immediate century. He works out
his misanthropy, if that is what it is, just as much through the social
‘realistic’ dramas of his middle period as in his earlier and last periods.
Ibsen will have everything overturned, everything destroyed. This makes him a
supreme dramatist and artist: his instinct is to go for the jugular every time,
which is what great plays are, after all, supposed to do.
So
much, then, for a brief description and critique of the Brustein essays
themselves. I wish now to depart into a more speculative ranging on my chosen
subject.
Brustein’s
treatment of ‘the theatre of revolt’ and the playwrights exemplifying his three
‘stages’ or phases of revolt has led me to ponder on what ‘total revolt’ is. If
it is total, then it is, by definition, revolt also against the self that is in
rebellion. One can only rebel at such a nonsensical proposition as that
everything must be destroyed, even if this emanates from oneself. Thus the
total rebel is at odds with himself as with the world and with life. Brustein
recognises this by saying that the only way the total rebel could reconcile his
contradictions was in the art he achieved: the drama brings about the enactment
of a reconciliation within the self that real life cannot, because the drama is
an art form that may contain and is strengthened by the tensions within
contradictions, passing them on to the audience to resolve – if the audience
can. There is no need for the dramatic artist to resolve them if real drama is not about resolution but
about perennial and unresolved conflict.
In this sense Ibsen reaches back two thousand years before the Christian
era of redemption to a pagan time both misty and mysteriously relevant to ourselves, when there was no personal
redemption. His plays are powerful, in other words, because in tone they reach
back to the Greeks, who had no concept of universal redemption, hence tragedy.
That is why Ibsen brings us back to Greek tragedy in a way that recalls us to
Marlowe and Shakespeare, and surpasses anyone else otherwise in the ability to
re-create the essentially claustrophobic effect of a pagan Greek tragedy (what
part does Nordic polytheism play in this? I wish Brustein could have said more
about it.)
But my
subject here is only incidentally about plays, much as I consider plays to be
the ideal means of exemplifying the sort of total revolt that cannot be
realised in practice – except partially and vicariously in the practice of
writing plays and in the experience of seeing them.
Let me try to suggest what ‘total revolt’ is.
It is manifested as a deep-rooted feeling of
implacable subversion. Nothing is accepted, and one looks at everything with
the idea at the back of one’s mind of everything being upturned and destroyed.
It does not necessarily imply that people are worthless, but what is worthless is what they are tied to,
what they are in subservience to, what they worship and adore, what they cling
on to.
The total rebel might see even more evidence for
this universal worthlessness in the world of today than in that of forty or
fifty years ago, and yet by some supreme irony the intellectuals of our time no
longer embrace any kind of ‘outsider’ philosophy. Everything – including revolt
– is no more than a social or linguistic ‘construction of reality’. And so
there is no way forward for the total rebel. The intellectual alternative is
willingly to pimp for the worthless, in opportunistic forms of jargon embodying
thin excuses for relativism that would have been laughed out of court fifty or
sixty years ago. There seems even more a case for sweeping everything away now
than there was when it was intellectually fashionable to be excited by thinkers
and writers who believed this. As the spirit of Kafka descends upon our
increasingly repressive and increasingly secretive bureaucratised and
routinised institutions, backed up by even more awesome and sophisticated
fire-power than before, there seems more than ever a reason to discern a dark
night of the individual soul, but this discernment is not taking place today at
any level of visibility. Ionesco was more prophetic than he knew: everyone is,
indeed, turning into a rhinoceros, following the herd in his and her own way. (The rhinoceros is not a herd animal, but let
us suppose that this beast represents an extreme individualism which
dialectically reverts to mass conformity.)
Creativity suffers – if
Brustein is right – for if the modern theatre is built on revolt then when
revolt is exhausted and eschewed the art has nowhere to go, creatively
speaking: Postmodernism is the bland, masturbatory substitute, absorbing an
inwardly exhausted but outwardly playful, cynical escapism. In the situation
where classicism as an artistic approach is rejected for good and all by artists
and masses alike, then revolt remains
as the only alternative: the only
wellspring for creative achievement as opposed to creative masturbation. We have not otherwise all become suddenly
mediocre, but that is the general impression.
Total revolt sees beyond the crisis, and beyond the ‘answers’ or resolutions
to the crisis. There is no final wall of certitude against which total revolt
is dashed. We all now apprehend the price of everything and the value of
nothing. The total rebel recognises the value of nothing whatever, and knows
that the price for believing there is a value is a price too high to pay. Tell
this to the budding playwright or novelist or poet! Given appropriate
circumstances, it will unblock every creative block there is, like an effective
emetic.
The creative need is made the more urgent by the
fact that the rebellion instinctively revolts against the self as well. Thus
without creativity the total rebel who is also mentally vulnerable descends
into insanity. Short of that, and with more mental resilience, into a painfully
arid life without hope or redemption, perhaps expressed as a sterile cynicism,
or – worse – in drugs, alcoholism, even criminality. Or in what may be more
widespread than any of these: a pretend ordinariness which finds no
satisfaction in pretending to be ordinary.
Is ‘pretending to be ordinary’ the highest I can hope to reach in the
one life I have to live?
I would distinguish this position of the total
rebel from the situation of psychopaths, with whom those in ‘total revolt’ may
be confused. The typical psychopath (if there is such a creature, for I am no
psychologist: perhaps I should say ‘ideal type’ though it seems inapposite
regarding psychopathology), is one with an acute mental condition, a
malfunctioning of certain areas of the brain: the psychopath literally cannot
tell right from wrong; he or she cannot begin to grasp the feelings of others
because he or she has no ‘feelings’ herself or at any rate cannot experience
certain inner drives self-reflexively. The physical analogy would be with
someone lacking the capacity to feel pain – as, say, from contact with a hot
stove. Needless to say, this puts the subject in a certain amount of danger: we
need our nerve-ends to transmit pain to us for the sake of our own physical
survival. The same is true in the moral or ethical sense for the psychopath. He
can never know the depth of the hurt or pain he may be causing others because
he cannot feel any hurt or pain in himself. With this lack goes an inability to
distinguish right from wrong in any actions: if we define ‘right’ in its
broadest sense as not doing harm to others and ‘wrong’ in its broadest sense as
inflicting harm on others. This is why criminal psychopaths will most likely be
sent to closed mental institutions rather than prisons. How could the
psychopath ever really know how others thought about him? How could he ever
judge the efficacy of an action if he knew only of certain consequences (such as the ability to become more powerful)
and not others? How could he consolidate a position of power if he had no
actual desire for it except as an amusement, like a boy with power over flies?
The psychopath, to use the current cant, is simply ‘not in touch with his
feelings’. He does have innate,
buried feelings, but although they provide the drive, he cannot grasp them in
their entirety, and so does not really know why he does anything. I would think
his world would be extremely bewildering. I suspect that children can be cruel
and apparently unfeeling for this very reason: their brains have not developed
sufficiently for them to empathise with the pain of others, including that of
harmless small creatures that they may torture to death for the immediate
pleasure and detached fascination of it. But this cruelty also takes in the
suffering children can inflict upon one another. Indeed, it is the suffering of
this cruelty that helps some children to ‘grow up’ that much sooner – and for
better or worse. It is also possible that psychopathology is present in the
hysterical mass mentality of lynch mobs, or is perhaps assisted by intoxicants,
as in the case with some violent hooliganism. This would represent a temporary
suspension of the moral faculties in group form.
The psychopath is not
in rebellion because he is not aware that there is any overall war – certainly
none within his own soul. The ‘total rebel’ on the other hand, whose behaviour
is equally instinctive, is fully aware of his feelings and what he hates about
himself, of the implications of actions, of right and wrong moralities whether
he subscribes to them or not. His mental faculties penetrate beyond all
conventional usages and opinions. It is useful to cite Ibsen again in this
context: Ibsen was reported in conversation as once saying that any idea or
belief, taken to its logical extreme, contradicts itself.
The total rebel is likely to believe something like
the following. All beliefs, opinions, ideas, theories are – if taken to their
logical conclusions – likely to end up as absurdities. The bigger the ideas (here he or she departs
somewhat from Ibsen, but following the great dramatist’s line of thought) the
grosser the absurdities involved. Plato’s Republic
at its most philosophically sublime is loaded with the creakiest absurdities.
Likewise, the imminent Second Coming and Day of Judgement as quite clearly and
unequivocally proclaimed by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. It is a grand
and wonderful, healing vision – but it did not happen, either then or two
thousand years later, and it keeps getting postponed. Which appears to put
Christ on somewhat the same level as the shabbiest street evangelist waving a
placard saying THE END IS NIGH. Marx is – to my mind – the greatest intellect
produced by the 19th century, even including Darwin; he unravelled
the nature of capitalism and the history of the age of capital more profoundly
than anyone before him or since, and incidentally founded whole sciences along
the way. But Marx – might well say our hypothetical total rebel - thought
working-class revolution to be more or less imminent, and it was the
philosophical-dialectical basis of his theorising that led him to believe
this. Though an admirable predictor in
many respects, in this absolutely central respect Marx was entirely wrong; not
just a little wrong but entirely wrong.
The whole richness of subsequent Marxist apologetics, historiography,
interpretation and exegesis rests on this one, big towering mistake and
delusion – which looks more like an absurdity to the total rebel the closer he
examines it: as if working classes could ever rise up to destroy and
expropriate, when unemployment and bad times lead to worker subjugation and
impotence, whilst full employment and
good times lead to workers striking
only for better wages to climb on the gravy train along with everybody else.
This is not to gainsay a fundamental proposition that different classes exist,
exist mainly in conflict, and that for various reasons one class may well
supersede another in time – not in itself an exclusively ‘Marxist’ view, as Marx
himself was the first to point out.
Of course as a Marxist I regard this argument
critiquing Marx as requiring unpicking (for example I would urge closer
scrutiny into Marx’s theoretical justifications for capitalism as an
intrinsically self-destructing phenomenon-totality with all that this implies
for social revolutionary fallout as being inevitable) and I’d want to add that
the jury is still out on proletarian revolution as such; but I do not necessarily
help a theory simply by postponing its culmination in reality to some
indefinite time in the future. The same postponement, as I said, became the
fate of Christian eschatology. And if one says that only conscious
revolutionary praxis will bring on the revolution, this leads to delusive
voluntarism if such praxis does not
become embraced by the majority of the working class. I say that is still possible - that is, on a global scale and in relation to the
exigencies and crises of capitalism. It is still possible; but then, anything
is possible. But this is, of course, to take a passive observer’s view rather
than that of the potential or actual participant and fomenter with urgent needs
and perceptions to match.
Where – between these two - does the total rebel
stand? Or does he stand between them at all?
The total rebel revolts instinctively against any
received body of ideas, from any direction. He thus appears to negate all
metaphysics, though an anti-metaphysical stand could be construed as being
itself a metaphysic, just as an atheistic stand recognises the Other by
negating it: in other words, atheism is on the same level of belief as theism,
for it distinguishes itself necessarily from the belief that God exists or it
cannot be distinguished at all. It is thus tied up in the knots of perpetual
and recurring criticism, like the querulous son who has let his obsessive
hatred for his father dominate his life – in other words, his father dominates
his life. The reasons for the wholesale negation by total revolt will vary from
individual to individual, but among them lurks precisely an instinctual
attachment to something like Ibsen’s dictum: everything once stated may be
reduced to an absurdity by a process of logical extension. So why swallow it in
the first place? This rejection, to be felt, does not come cheap. Easy enough
to reject everything without formerly having had the experience of believing in
everything: without the pain of comprehensive forsaking, that kind of rejection
is trivial and sophomoric, perhaps forming no more than a prelude to a successful
and lucrative career in exegetics. Authentic
and painful rejection – that of the total rebel – must stem from belief
constantly and consistently frustrated, indeed from the deep-rooted desire to
believe which is ever frustrated by the dull drumbeat of continual negation,
like a headache.
On the other hand, the total rebel will know only
too well that to passively avoid
strong commitment by obeying the ‘herd instinct’, that is, to follow the
footsteps of whoever is immediately in front of you, and to follow to the
bitter end the anti-philosophical, blinkered perceptions of what is called
‘common sense’, can lead to a numbing of all the perceptive and critical
faculties. Nazism might not have reached power in Germany if more Germans had
put aside the ‘common sense’ of just getting on with daily life and ignoring
the fanaticisms of politics. This ‘common sense’ disease is affecting the
political vitality of our own society today – with disastrous possibilities in
future for all our civil liberties and environmental standards. Nor is there
any point in placing one’s ‘faith’ in science. Science is not there to be
‘believed’; it has nothing to show that can or need be ‘believed’, in the sense
that one has to ‘believe’ in the Second Coming or in the proletarian revolution.
It renders provisional hypotheses on physical matter. If one says one
‘believes’ in science one might as well say one ‘believes’ in a cookbook.
But many can be sceptical without being rebellious.
Scepticism may indeed intellectually characterise one total rebel or another,
but total rebellion is not pre-eminently or necessarily intellectual. It is instinctive; objection to absurdities
is ramified by the energy of one’s entire being. I refuse to believe ONE MORE
RIDICULOUS THING! I refuse to be played for a sucker! The reaction to proposals
is not one of vast academic critical erudition; it is one of profound
nay-saying, the big NO. One simply rejects everything, and that is that.
The total rebel may not derive any joy from his
rebellion at all; it may provoke nothing but misery and anxiety, and probably
does. In order to do even the least little thing well, one has to believe in
it. But if one rebels against all beliefs and the sheer fatuity of nearly all
activities, how can one do anything well? If one does anything, with any goal
in mind, does this not make one only a partial rebel? We shall examine this
proposition a little further.
Partial rebels get on rather better. They effect real, concrete revolutions – in
politics, labour legislation, medicine, women’s rights, gay lib, hygiene, art,
literature, national liberation, science, whatever. That is because one side of
them does not rebel against another, leaving the rebellious side to get on with
the struggle without having to face the danger of internal subversion. But the
positive absurdities of the partial rebels catch up with them sooner or later,
when the limitations and circumscriptions on their partial ‘revolutions’ lead
to reversals, or – worse still – to an even bigger and even more repressive
bureaucracy, or to yet more exegetic pedantry.
Or, worse still, to ‘backlashes’ provoked from within all those dark
forces that the partial rebel has not
included in his or her enlightened campaign of change and renewal – because the
partial rebel countenances no ‘dark forces’ in himself. There is a paradox.
Only total revolt would mop up all
this absurdity residue; but at the same time total revolt is impossibly futile and even sterile because it
implies cross-purposes right from the start.
The total rebel is indeed dependent to some extent
on the partial rebel, whose painstaking statistics showing vast discrepancies
or deprivations here and there can be quoted with gusto. The total rebel is a
kind of armchair buffoon in this respect. There is nothing particularly sublime
about total revolt unless the rebel realises this in some kind of artistic
achievement (a political act is more problematical since politics within
society as we know it is generally either compromise or terrorism). But is this
achievement itself not some kind of unsuitable modus vivendi for a total rebel?
Yet the total rebel may be excused for employing strategies
and tactics. For any strategy, with tactics to match, is to conceal the extent
and depth of his subversiveness from others. One must allow revolt some
secrecy. A successful tactician is one who can keep a strategic secret well
hidden. Indeed, without the secret the total rebel will be socially
obliterated. Therefore, the totality of total revolt lies as much in distracting,
circumventing, evading, even lying as in commitment to total subversion. The
more brilliant the tactics, the more thoroughgoing the rebelling
endeavour. What is revolt if not
implicitly violent and extreme vis-à-vis such status quo or ruling order as
exists? A sheepish and mild-mannered revolt is no revolt at all. The
implications of revolt carry the high risk of catastrophe. This revolt must
therefore be concealed from others if total revolt kindles one’s blood and
stirs in one’s bosom. Sometimes it can be cleverly concealed as partial revolt.
I suggest an outcome in ‘catastrophe’ because the total rebel is – as the title of the
1950s Hollywood film says – a ‘rebel without a cause’. The total revolt does
not come from embrace of a ‘higher cause’, however fanatical. It is embedded in
the emotional grain of the rebel, possibly from birth. This is not revolt for something but against everything. It has infantile qualities: one can see it
every day in the squalling baby who is simply ‘against everything’: no
reasoning or placating can deter it. We carry everything from our pasts within
us, and that includes our babyhood, though some of us pass more or less through
babyhood more easily than others. It
does not detract from Ibsen’s towering genius and profound maturity to claim
that he carries his own infancy with him to the grave. Nor is babyhood and its
later residue of infantilism a pathological condition, as in psychopathology.
If to be humanly mammalian is to be ‘abnormal’ then we are all perversions of
nature.
The total revolt is negative. It is for sweeping
away, for destruction. The after effects are not considered; it is an emotional
charge, not a quest for humanitarianism: the humanitarian vision – as such - is
the more positive for being the more vague, and the more vague for being the
more positive. It would thus be profoundly dangerous if total revolt were not
impotent, at least in its purest manifestation. I am not saying it is good or
bad. It is just there. And, I think, more common than we might believe – if, as
I have stated, it runs on from infancy, which is our common inheritance. I find
it more convincing to conceive of other people, whatever their station, as
having an enormously rich and turbulent inner life than an inner life completely
void and vacuous: something I find difficult to swallow, let alone comprehend.
What therefore may help explain their fundamental passivity lies not in
postulating empty-headedness (except perhaps in such temporary situations as
drug-induced or media-induced stupor) but in postulating the almost exact
cancelling-out of a rebellious impulse by another impulse. The stasis is a stasis-in-turbulence, not a
stasis as a vacuity. Total revolt is not
completely absent from the majority;
it is simply more completely manifest in a minority – or so I believe; I have
not taken a poll.
Total revolt flares up in the brush fires here and
there of the partial, and here is where danger lies. The revolt is of its
essence negative, and this negativity may be brought to bear with ferocious
intensity upon one single aspect, one little thing. Every violence may be a
partial outlet for an inner total revolt. Otherwise, in the usually peaceable
circumstances, the outward appearance of calm is actually a seething. This is
where creative sublimations are so desperately important. Without them, there
might only be ceaseless outrages of violence. Sometimes this is recognised in
enlightened policies, as when, for example, convicted juvenile joy riders are
given instruction in motor mechanics, so that their fascination with cars and
speed can be channelled into a positive and useful craft. Total revolt does
nothing for one’s self respect, and lack of self-respect can contribute to
crime and to violence. The enlightened penal policy is to increase self-respect
rather than diminish it. By diminishing self-respect, as per the ‘tough on
crime’ policies of lock ‘em up and throw the key away proponents, one simply
recharges the voltage of total revolt, but with intensifying and ever more dangerous
purposelessness. And we should not forget that one of the purest if also most
futile manifestations of total revolt – as an act – is suicide. Suicide is the
ultimate self-defeating and delusive act of total revolt. It is self-defeating because it is total
revolt expiring as nullity. Not total
nullity, since the effect of a suicide will bring distress and certainly a
not-inconsiderable inconvenience to others – but bringing more sorrow and
misery down on a few others can at best be only a pitiable and contemptible
expression of it. Even the armchair buffoon has rebelled better than this – if
only because he had everybody fooled, and not necessarily himself as well.
There may be some objection to my
individualism. But individualism is
inherent in total revolt. Existence
within a rebelling collective requires a high degree of discipline and a
narrowing of the focus of revolt upon specific objects. One has to water-down
the ‘total’ here, for there is no room in the collective commitment for
self-revolt, self-doubt. It is the self-revolt within individualism which
renders total revolt as futile as it is all-encompassing, together with the
impotence of isolation. It is the delusive freedom within the individual/inner
life which germinates or perpetuates total revolt. I did not say total revolt
was a great thing. I merely said it is there. I do not think this is an
idealist construction because I have assumed that the phenomenon arises from
definite reactions within a mammalian, familial and social development. I do
not even say that it is necessarily prolonged and stimulated after babyhood in
all cultures or all possible cultures. I have suggested that amongst other
things it is an extension from infantilism; my own view is that our particular
Western culture stimulates prolonged and profound infantilism in a variety of
ways, some of which are indulgent, others repressive: like the baby regime. But
babies grow up and mental life elaborates seemingly infinitely. Combine this
with our enforced and inauthentic situation of extreme individualism, and the
contradictions inherent in individualised actions, and one has total revolt.
Too much has been made of the so-called conflict or
contradiction between ‘the individual and society’. This construction or
paradigm is in fact an ideology reflecting (and perpetuating) a reified social
situation. Here is what the young Marx has to say to counter this formulation,
in the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 (Milligan translation, 1959, pp. 137-138 ):
My
general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general
consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it
with hostility. [My emphasis of this phrase – MM] The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore
also my theoretical existence as a
social being.
Above
all we must avoid postulating “Society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual
is the social being. His life, even
if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life in association with others – is therefore an
expression and confirmation of social
life. Man’s individual and species life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of
existence of the individual is a more particular,
or more general mode of the life of
the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general
individual life.
This and other passages of the young Marx might be
seized upon by the Right as an obvious indication of how deeply ‘totalitarian’
Marx really was. Stalin et. al. were simply bringing Marx’s theory of the
socialised individual to fruition on a vast and terrifying scale. Thus the downfall of ‘Marxism’ with the
collapse in the 1990s of Soviet Communism. But it surely does not take too much
intelligence to see that modern ‘totalitarianism’ is the extreme form of the
‘hostility’ that Marx is actually describing in the above passage. You cannot
even be an ‘individual’ except as a social being. The social
aspect in you gives you your uniqueness (including refinement of personality),
just as your individual needs shape and identify the social organism within
which you exist and survive. To borrow a term from biology, the reified society
is a mutation of socialised human
society, the latter a supreme fact of material human existence on this earth.
Reified ‘Society’ has an all-too-obvious reality as a mutation (that is, it is
a concrete manifestation) but remains a mutation nevertheless which must be
ideologically justified as ‘normal’. If
one accepts with Marx, as I do, that ‘Society’ - as set over and above the
individual human beings making it up - is a reification of complex, socialising
and interacting human-hood into a single thing-hood (a process sometimes
leading to superstitiously creating a religious icon for a postulated divine
being, or worshipping the Monarch in Their Person as the supreme embodiment of
the State, the Nation, the Church, etc., etc.), then one will suspect certain
implications regarding the total rebel. The total rebel is a stepchild of the
living lie of this living reification:
of ‘Society’ as being opposed to himself or herself as an individual -
with a confrontation of a definitely perceived ‘hostility’. The dialectical
emergence is that of the total rebel: individualistic in the extreme, opposed
to all society – that is, to all notions whatever, even to the socialised or
internalised being of the self. If it is not in itself a pathological condition
it can – given yet more pressure from without – become one.
Let us, then, suppose that total revolt is a
greater or lesser pressure upon an individual psyche. How is it dealt with?
Usually – I suspect – by dither, prevarication, putting-off, hitting-out (often
‘inappropriately’), terror and morbidity and withdrawal, deception, including
occasional self-deception, sliding from one mistaken misjudgement to another,
bad timing, constant vowing of repentance and renewal, the inexplicable
break-up of friendships and even closer relationships. Of course I must not
turn it into a catch-all for everything, and did not intend this. I merely
sought to delineate as fully as possible all the various and often cackhanded
varieties of total revolt in its outward, day-to-day manifestations. It is too
‘total’ to be realised perfectly. It is only realised imperfectly, which means
often ridiculously. The greatest fictional exponent of total revolt (if not
also the earliest) is Hamlet. My interpretation of Hamlet the play is that it is irreducible to a prince’s peevishness
about his nasty and corrupt uncle and his less than innocent mother –
reducible, that is, to the conventional revenge-tragedy genre from which the
play descends. I do not see that Hamlet the prince is rebelling against
anything in particular, but against everything,
even against himself and his visions (for he doubts the provenance of his
father’s ghostly visitations), not to speak of the very idea of consummated
romantic love. Naturally a total rebellion is difficult even to fathom within
oneself if one is unaccustomed to doing so, let alone to resolve. This (I
believe) is why Hamlet appears to dither and prevaricate and hide behind
endless disguising ‘tactics’ for so long. And why he manages to kill – directly
or indirectly – all the wrong people: Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes (a whole
innocent family obliterated), sometimes by mistake, sometimes in exaggerated
cruelty, sometimes in futility (fighting a duel with one who could have been
his ally). And, of course, Hamlet does not resolve his ‘revolt’ very
satisfactorily, since although he achieves partial revolt through several
deaths, including that of his uncle, he also opens the door to conquest and
usurpation by Denmark’s ostensible Norwegian foe, the bitterest enemies of his
heroic warrior father’s. (It is difficult to believe that the patriot
Shakespeare intended conquest of any
nation by a foreign army to result in a benign outcome.) In some sense, of
course, ‘total revolt’ is achieved since Hamlet brings down his whole house
with him. But it would be difficult to say that this had ‘swept away
everything’ in the clean, unequivocal Ibsenite sense. The actual outcome is, in
the sublimest dramatic sense, entirely messy and self-defeating. And that is
because the effort is individualistic - Hamlet makes no attempt to form a
faction or an alliance, let alone a connection with the people - and is riven
with self-revolt, self-contradiction and implicit terror of the most
fundamental kind: a common affliction, I suspect, with total rebels. Had Hamlet forged a secret political alliance
to expedite his political take-over, as any sensible prince would do in these
circumstances, he would have been only a partial rebel, and no doubt the
Elsinore bureaucracy would have burgeoned and carried out a more subtle
repression with the resulting prosperity and all the new ‘reforms’ and
mushrooming of non-governmental and regulatory agencies. But Hamlet’s stance in
the world is one of total revolt partially comprehended. (It is of course
fatuous to extrapolate too tenuously
from plays, but it has struck me that Hamlet could never have got on
particularly well with his own father in life – no doubt why he exiled himself
for so long as a student in distant Wittenberg.) Hamlet, in other words, is our
best-yet fictional exemplar of the total rebel.
What is the practical way to proceed? Total
rebellion does not admit of practicalities because it is a revolt against
reality: a mutated reality within a reality. It is not by the same token an escape from reality. Escape from reality is something we all do
all the time (or as much of the time as we can) whether we are ‘rebels’ or not.
The total rebel does not ‘escape’ from reality all the time, however. He faces reality both below and beyond the
visionary. That is his problem. But because he is against reality in its
perceived totality, the effect or
outcome in his particular and inadequate case seems much the same as an escape,
except that it is awkward and fumbling because the rebel impulse is – though
ingrained – not developed or steeled in experience. I would like us to be able
to distinguish within ourselves the difference between escaping and rebelling.
The difference is fundamental, even if – paradoxically – the outcome has all
the appearances of being much the same whether as ‘escape’ or as ‘revolt’. One of the total rebel’s tactics must be to
perceive and work on the fact that society itself will attempt to blur this
vital distinction by way of misleading the total rebel somewhere along the
way. (Psychiatrists and counsellors take
note.) Of course, some would interpret ‘escape’ itself as a tacit or implicit
rebellion, though words begin to lose any meaning once they are subjected to
such sophistry.
I do not mind if people use ‘total revolt’ as an
excuse. They prevaricate, yes, and they are humbugs to the extent that they do,
but they are also on their guard because they have conjured up the ineradicable
image of revolt, and – once conjured up - ‘revolt’ is a powerful stimulus, not
always controllable or predictable. It can also turn round the more immediate
despair, manifested in common depression, whilst preserving and safeguarding
the existential despair. Escape equals
sustained depression: this is my E equals mc squared. Escape or mere
ducking out is a lowering, dehumanising, demeaning, roasted peanuts substitute
for a three-course dinner. You would think from what I have just written that
total revolt with its incoherent fumblings was even more so. I say it is a
healthy growth, drawn from the healthy lusts of babyhood honestly acknowledged.
Once you fix ‘revolt’ in your mind instead of ‘escape’, then who knows what
outcome there will be? An uncertain
outcome is at least better than a certain dead end. It is in the order of personal advancement,
but – as it turns out – of survival, not specific pecuniary rewards or status
or whatever, all of which are despised as contemptible. As we find ourselves
being picked off, one by one, we have to assert what we can of our rebellious
and self-righteous natures even if such righteousness looks like humbug and
self-serving nonsense. By way of analogy, if my prayer to God (in whom I do not
believe) delivers me from falling off the mountain at that moment because it
strengthens my tenuous grip, what do I care, if I survive? Total revolt is the
nonsense that might yet save us from the even more complete and totalising
nonsense that is steadily reducing each of us to human nullity and degradation
– that is, nullity and self-degradation apparent even to our own eyes, if we
let it be manifested.
Total revolt is especially useful as and when
conditions outside the self become more extreme. So far, we have existed in
some kind of uneasy equilibrium with the great powers. We have survived in the
margins – says he of the working middle class. But the very margins are
contracting. Revolt must be brought home and must come from within. It can
fasten on all sorts of justifications – who cares what particular
justifications are when survival is the order of the discourse at hand? Provided the justifications are all embracing,
radical and ‘unfair’?
So
might speak the total rebel. But total rebellion is objectively futile and is a
product of despair even as it keeps immediate despair at bay. Some might say it
has its most insidious manifestation in terrorism, which is also despairing,
secretive and conspiratorial. Yet
terrorism remains – for all its violence and bloodshed – a partial revolt,
because paradoxically it embraces the same ‘common sense’ view of the world of
appearances as that of its ostensible enemy, the social Establishment. If
anything, the terrorist view is even cruder, for it honestly believes that the
blowing up of supermarkets, buses and the like (which can only kill and maim the innocent) makes a literal difference – that
is, against a capitalism whose true power is anything but ‘literal’. Capitalism is profoundly theoretical – the first and
to date the most sophisticated abstract means of social control ever invented,
(which, incidentally, makes it the ideal benefactor of the triple A’s:
alienated academic apologetics). Capitalism in even its grossest manifestations
(and especially those) can survive the blowing up of individual supermarkets.
In fact it can thrive on that, just as the incompetent and uncertainly mandated
George W Bush and cohorts thrived politically on the massacre of 11 September
2001. The instruments of total social repression
are already in place – from space satellite downwards – and those controlling
them are only waiting and itching for the chance of practical and wide-scale
implementation. Terrorism turns out to be the collective equivalent to
individual suicide in terms of futility and self-defeat – it always would have
been, with or without satellites. The total rebel has to reject terrorism on
the grounds that its limited perspective brings about the exact opposite of
what it self-delusively intends. Total revolt is, of course, also
self-defeating in the attempt at any action (I think I have made this abundantly
clear, that is, it is self-defeating by definition), but because of its totality it can retreat and manoeuvre
and self-justify till kingdom come - or, produce artistic masterpieces of one
kind or another to stimulate the masochistic tendencies of the better-off but
insecure Establishment cognoscenti.
Total revolt’s best friend is that which corrupts it: a social-aesthetic
acceptance – even enthusiastic acceptance – from within the ranks of those it
hates.
There
may be a way ‘forward’ for the total rebel which incorporates even self-doubt
and self-revolt without the latter becoming entirely crippling. This will lie
in cultivating two apparently mutually contradictory tendencies/strategies
within one life and personality. The first tendency/strategy is the unstinted
cultivation of inner revolt: nothing to be compromised, nothing to be admired,
nothing to be embraced, nothing to be flattered, everything to be (deep-down)
despised, in a charged attitude ranging from contempt to loathing. The second
is the strategic disguise of respectable excellence.
Revolt is an admirable principle of education and
self-improvement. If the student rebels against the teacher or subject (or
both), then the onus falls heavily on that student to be better than the
teacher and to excel in the subject, to overcome it by first mastering it. Half
measures will not do if the revolt is profound and all encompassing. Only
through mastery can the rebel strike
home: otherwise, if he fails or evades the points he is ostensibly fighting,
then he is dismissed as an irrelevance. No one, however, can dismiss the rebel
who knows more than the conformist and ‘performs’ better. The revolt comes
closer to being ‘totalised’ by being that much more effective on both key
fronts of inner rebellion and outward excellence. Only total rebels totalising
through strategies make the best and certainly most interesting and challenging
students; the rest are comparative laptop-fodder.
The
situation in the arts world is different. Here, the rebel-artist is expected to ‘rebel’ to the extent that
‘rebellion’ in the arts becomes a kind of conformity. Even rebellion against
the commodity system in art (Duchamp), ends in the creation of pricey
commodities (extending even to reproductions
of Duchamp’s ‘found’ and signed urinals). In view of this double bind it is
interesting to note the profusion of means artists have found for temporarily
evading the otherwise endless round of rebellion-into-commodity which has
always characterised modern art. Unfortunately, in order to be able to afford
to make into a work of art something that could never be a commodity (the equivalent to a sand-painting, or for example
the shrouding of large buildings or great boulders in silken fabrics) the
artist must either be independently wealthy or have a public or private patron.
In fact it appears that many of the more avant-garde artists of today have gone
entirely the other way in deliberately producing pricey commodities endowed
with a frisson of nihilism. Even in
graffiti art a wall can become purchasable.
In
fact, the ‘respectable excellence’ strategy can become beguiling of itself, if
it is too successful. The total rebel ceases to cultivate the rebellious half,
ceases to be schizoid, in effect. When this happens the wellspring of
inspiration for excellence dries up; and the edge is taken off the energy. The
total rebel’s face to the world has to be total
rebellion, which includes both
destructive motivation and as high a
quality as possible in deflective strategies.
This is hardly the ideal life of poise and repose.
It is not a recommended formula for ‘inner peace’. It imposes a severe strain on the total
rebel’s every waking hour, and only those with strong constitutions and
stomachs can really survive it while still keeping to it. In any case, as
already stated, it always fails in the end. Arthur Miller once said that
‘failure is ill-defined’, but I think it is possible here to designate degrees
of failure in the total rebel. The highest degree – i.e., that of the most
‘positive’ - is some kind of outstanding achievement wrung from the depths of
rebellious loathing and despair. (This is what Brustein means when he tells us
that his great dramatists reconcile themselves to the world ultimately and only
through their own creations.) The second highest is the bringing about of some
sort of political chaos, at least the partial bringing-down of something outside the self and immediate
environs. The third highest degree of failure is to have managed to live
through a relatively unscathed life steering between the Scylla of inner
accommodation with the hate and the Charybdis of complete social ostracism
and/or obliteration. One level down from
this in the falling away from total revolt is criminality, including, of
course, violence and murder. Terrorism features in here somewhere. And then on down the scale (in terms of
rebellious ineffectuality if not also ethics and morality), to mindless
incapacitation through drug and alcohol abuse, down to a semi-willed
self-destruction or down to suicide. We get to a stage along this hypothetical
declining route where the ‘total revolt’ has become a parody of itself. In practice, these stages cannot always be
easily distinguished or stratified like the neat levels of Dante’s Inferno. The
great artist whose art derives from total revolt may also be going downhill as
an alcoholic whilst creating his best work out of the very deepest rebellion.
In the case of the rebel Jean Genet, the artist reached his art via
criminality.
All
this talk of ‘failure’ is deliberate. Fundamentally, the total rebel is on a
hiding to nothing. This is because he is a supreme embodiment of the
dysfunctionality of reified society. Society malfunctions and mutates to the
extent that a separation between ‘Society’ as a reified object and ‘the individual’ (another reification) is
manifested in concrete and institutionalised ways. It produces its most extreme
representative in the most extreme of all individualists, the total rebel. Of
course, if one adheres to dialectics one will be most certain that the total
rebel is a transitional figure: for
just as he points in one direction to the radical individualism of
dysfunctional society, so – in the other direction – does he point towards the
supersession of that society, since although he embraces his nurturing by
internalising the old society’s most extreme features, he also hates it and
kicks against the pricks (or bites the nipple that suckles him). If
dysfunctional society’s most perfect exemplar is the one who hates it the most
and the most comprehensively, then this is not only the measure of its
dysfunctionality but also of its dangerously centrifugal tendencies and of an
intimation of its mortality. Mutated society is itself self-destructive.
I have been giving thought to ‘revolt’ – and
especially to ‘total revolt’ – since re-reading Robert Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt, which was published
way back in 1964, incorporating material that he had written in the late 1950s.
Brustein (b. 1927) is the doyen of American ‘highbrow’ theatre critics and
dramaturgs. Re-reading a book now perhaps thought dated because of its
germination in the theatrical excitement of several decades ago is to
experience a blast of fresh air from the past.
Theatre of Revolt’s premise is that nine of the greatest dramatists
and exponents or founder-members of the modern as distinct from the classical
theatre – Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Shaw, Pirandello, O’Neill, Brecht, Artaud
and Genet – that is to say, nearly all of them, are protagonists of an
all-round, or total revolt; that it is, indeed, ‘revolt’ which characterises
the modern drama in general, including the greater and lesser dramaturgical
exponents. The old theatre was a theatre
of ‘communion’ (my own term for it is a ‘theatre of affirmation’); the modern
theatre is – or was when Brustein was writing, according to him - a ‘theatre of
revolt’.
In drama terms, the period background for this book
covers the ‘angry young man’ phenomenon, notable for the theatrical
‘revolution’ launched in that year of Suez, 1956, with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, swiftly followed by
a veritable explosion across British theatre and cinema which, incidentally,
included a few angry young women – Pinter, Wesker, Delaney, Jellicoe, Arden,
Rudkin, Wood, Behan, not to speak of that tragically overlooked precursor John
Whiting; film dramatisations of Sillitoe, Braine, Kingsley Amis and so on.
Brustein was writing at a time when the world impact of Beckett, as well as of
Ionesco and others characterised by the late Martin Esslin as ‘the theatre of
the absurd’, the momentous visit to London in the mid 1950s of Brecht’s
Berliner Ensemble marking the advent in the West of ‘epic theatre’, plus Albee,
Kopit, Gelber and others from across the Atlantic, were all in evidence, while
the Eastern European drama of Gombrowicz, Mrozek and Havel was beginning to be
noticed outside the confines of the Soviet ‘satellite’ countries. It was a
period when the cinema of Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Antonioni and the
French nouvelle vague was reaching a wide Anglo-Saxon audience – a great
time to be alive and young and theatregoing and cinemagoing, as I recall. But
Brustein has his mind not on all this (except for his frequent citings of
Beckett and Ionesco) but on what he apparently considers the central thrust of
the whole movement as embodied in his nine chosen subjects.
The philosophical
background for this book is one in which French Existentialism was fashionable
still; when Structuralism, not to speak of the later Poststructuralism or Postmodernism,
had scarcely been heard of outside certain Parisian circles (except that the
first was already being disseminated indirectly through the anthropology of
Lévi-Strauss and to some extent in the writings of Lucien Goldmann). It was a
time – around 1960 - when Sartre could write plausibly of Marxism and
Existentialism as being the two interacting philosophical trajectories of the
day, and anyone who was not an Oxford linguistic analyst had to pay court to
Existentialism one way or another, including the theologians Barth and Tillich.
All this seems very remote from the intellectual scene fifty-odd years later in
the 21st century, whether in France or elsewhere, since Marxism –
seemingly on the verge of an intellectual hegemonic triumph by the early 1970s
- subsequently, it seemed, went with the formerly militant Western working
class into semi-eclipse (as ‘post Marxism’) while Existentialism is heard of no
more. Nevertheless, the fundamental writings informing Existentialism are as
inspirational and as avidly read and analysed as ever: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger. The last two were claimed for Postmodernism as well. As,
indeed, was Marx to some extent, at least by such as Foucault and Derrida. (Sartre, it should be recalled, could not –
at great length - leave old Marx alone, either.)
Brustein’s
writing, though not on the same intellectual level as these philosophers and
not intended to be so, remains stimulating, in its own way, from across the
years. From sources in practising journalism and teaching as well as in dramaturgy,
his treatment of ideas is lucid and without academic ponderousness. He breaks
down ‘revolt’ into three phases: ‘messianic,’ ‘social’ and ‘existential’. The
first phase, the ‘messianic’, is the one in which the playwright in question
renounces God (or declares Him dead) and sets himself up, rebelliously and
Lucifer-like, as ‘overman’ in God’s place, as man, artist and prophet. This is a phase very much influenced by the
protean Nietzsche, fairly obviously, and in particular by Thus Spake Zarathustra. It represents the playwright as militant
seer, at any rate the drama, with a prophetic voice like a ‘cry in the
wilderness’. The second phase is one of ‘social’ revolt: this turns the
searchlight on community and society by way of searing critique, with even a
revolutionist or at any rate socially subversive tone. The third phase is
‘existential’, the dying phase of the ‘theatre of revolt’: this posits, with a
certain weariness, a total absurdity in human existence with despairing and
tragic overtones.
Lucifer has failed, in the end. The ‘phases’ have come full circle. The
messianic had also implications for a mankind situated in the universe, but trumpeting
a message of defiance and ultimate triumph for the new world of new beings to
supersede the old, as presaged by the dramatist and his plays. Passing through
the social, the cycle returns once more to cosmological implications, but this
time the message is one of utter futility and despair.
Brustein
makes no attempt to fashion these phases as appearing in an invariable
chronological order (they are much too fluid and interacting for that), and the
only dramatist who fits all three of them in such an order more or less to
perfection is Henrik Ibsen, with August Strindberg a close second. Chekov never
goes through a ‘messianic’ phase at all: his compass is confined to the
‘social’ and (at any rate implicitly) the ‘existential’. Brustein is right to suggest
that Chekov was not as ‘objectively realist’ as he claimed to be, ordering his
plays within a moral perspective of his own. At the same time it is difficult
to make out any sort of case for Chekov as a rebel, and although his
tragi-comedies indicate social developments in the Russia of the time, they
cannot be said to be manifestations of any sort of ‘social revolt’ on Chekov’s
part. Dr Chekov the diagnosing physician was uninterested in abstract ideas and
in political programmes, revolutionary or otherwise.
Brustein’s
case for several others is at best tenuous. He could not quite come to terms
with Pirandello’s crypto-fascism and overt support for Mussolini. His portrayal
of the genial and garrulous Shaw as in a state of ‘revolt’ also begs a few questions.
Shaw’s political position evolved into a curious amalgam of (rather dated)
gradualist and benign socialism with inclinations towards ‘strong man’
adoration (which unfortunately never dates). Brustein’s argumentation is forced
to dwell on Heartbreak House (when
the war-weary Shaw finally lost his cool) and on Back to Methuselah (an interminable drama in the ‘messianic mode’)
– neither play representing Shaw at his best. And on Man and Superman (which indeed is
Shaw at his best, but as a dazzling comedy of manners it hardly seems to
represent a dramatist in revolt, even as it punctures the pompous certainties
of the male half of human society). As for the rest, Brustein admits that Shaw
is writing mainly for entertainment with a little argumentation here and there,
like grit for the pearl. Brustein’s
treatment of Brecht is, I think, vitiated by his Cold War ignorance of and
one-sided approach to Marxist dialectic, so that he is quite unable to give an
accurate account of Brecht’s aesthetics as they are informed by his
revolutionary socialist ethos, though the pre-Marxist plays are focused on with
interest (Brustein either ignores or is unaware of the major and enduring
Marxist aesthetic confrontation of Brecht and Lukacs.) Brustein fails most
consistently with O’Neill, whose large oeuvre is almost entirely dismissed
except for the two late plays, The Ice
Man Cometh and Long Day’s Journey
Into Night, because only these fit into Brustein’s grand scheme for
O’Neill’s inclusion in the pantheon.
(One feels it may have been thought necessary to get an American in
there somewhere.) The only ones who
satisfactorily fill Brustein’s bill are Ibsen, Strindberg, Artaud and Genet:
all undoubtedly turbulent – in at least two cases to the point of severe mental
disorder – and all undoubtedly subversive rebels in their bones to the end.
Ibsen
is the grand old man of total revolt, and it is Brustein’s chapter on Ibsen
that I – seeking to find out what Brustein thought total revolt was – believe
to be the most illuminating. Ibsen (whom MC Bradbrook thought was one of the
two greatest writers of the 19th century – the other being Tolstoy –
and I agree with her despite the steep competition) was against everything. His concept of ‘revolt’ was
total, implacable, and consistent to the end, seeking and finding successive
means – ‘messianic’, ‘social’ and ‘existential’ – to express it according to
these various phases in his artistic development. When remarking that the only
true revolution was the Flood, Ibsen noted that even the Flood had survivors in
Noah’s Ark. His response: ‘I would torpedo
the ark!’ It is grand, ferocious, and
total. We misread Ibsen if we imagine that his ‘social’ plays were dramas
advocating reform (thus so highly and mistakenly esteemed by Shaw, amongst
others). Ibsen’s vision was cast far beyond his immediate century. He works out
his misanthropy, if that is what it is, just as much through the social
‘realistic’ dramas of his middle period as in his earlier and last periods.
Ibsen will have everything overturned, everything destroyed. This makes him a
supreme dramatist and artist: his instinct is to go for the jugular every time,
which is what great plays are, after all, supposed to do.
So
much, then, for a brief description and critique of the Brustein essays
themselves. I wish now to depart into a more speculative ranging on my chosen
subject.
Brustein’s
treatment of ‘the theatre of revolt’ and the playwrights exemplifying his three
‘stages’ or phases of revolt has led me to ponder on what ‘total revolt’ is. If
it is total, then it is, by definition, revolt also against the self that is in
rebellion. One can only rebel at such a nonsensical proposition as that
everything must be destroyed, even if this emanates from oneself. Thus the
total rebel is at odds with himself as with the world and with life. Brustein
recognises this by saying that the only way the total rebel could reconcile his
contradictions was in the art he achieved: the drama brings about the enactment
of a reconciliation within the self that real life cannot, because the drama is
an art form that may contain and is strengthened by the tensions within
contradictions, passing them on to the audience to resolve – if the audience
can. There is no need for the dramatic artist to resolve them if real drama is not about resolution but
about perennial and unresolved conflict.
In this sense Ibsen reaches back two thousand years before the Christian
era of redemption to a pagan time both misty and mysteriously relevant to ourselves, when there was no personal
redemption. His plays are powerful, in other words, because in tone they reach
back to the Greeks, who had no concept of universal redemption, hence tragedy.
That is why Ibsen brings us back to Greek tragedy in a way that recalls us to
Marlowe and Shakespeare, and surpasses anyone else otherwise in the ability to
re-create the essentially claustrophobic effect of a pagan Greek tragedy (what
part does Nordic polytheism play in this? I wish Brustein could have said more
about it.)
But my
subject here is only incidentally about plays, much as I consider plays to be
the ideal means of exemplifying the sort of total revolt that cannot be
realised in practice – except partially and vicariously in the practice of
writing plays and in the experience of seeing them.
Let
me try to suggest what ‘total revolt’ is.
It
is manifested as a deep-rooted feeling of implacable subversion. Nothing is
accepted, and one looks at everything with the idea at the back of one’s mind
of everything being upturned and destroyed. It does not necessarily imply that
people are worthless, but what is
worthless is what they are tied to, what they are in subservience to, what they
worship and adore, what they cling on to.
The
total rebel might see even more evidence for this universal worthlessness in
the world of today than in that of forty or fifty years ago, and yet by some
supreme irony the intellectuals of our time no longer embrace any kind of
‘outsider’ philosophy. Everything – including revolt – is no more than a social
or linguistic ‘construction of reality’. And so there is no way forward for the
total rebel. The intellectual alternative is willingly to pimp for the
worthless, in opportunistic forms of jargon embodying thin excuses for
relativism that would have been laughed out of court fifty or sixty years ago.
There seems even more a case for sweeping everything away now than there was
when it was intellectually fashionable to be excited by thinkers and writers
who believed this. As the spirit of Kafka descends upon our increasingly
repressive and increasingly secretive bureaucratised and routinised
institutions, backed up by even more awesome and sophisticated fire-power than
before, there seems more than ever a reason to discern a dark night of the
individual soul, but this discernment is not taking place today at any level of
visibility. Ionesco was more prophetic than he knew: everyone is, indeed,
turning into a rhinoceros, following the herd in his and her own way. (The rhinoceros is not a herd animal, but let
us suppose that this beast represents an extreme individualism which
dialectically reverts to mass conformity.)
Creativity suffers – if Brustein is right – for if the modern theatre is
built on revolt then when revolt is exhausted and eschewed the art has nowhere
to go, creatively speaking: Postmodernism is the bland, masturbatory substitute,
absorbing an inwardly exhausted but outwardly playful, cynical escapism. In the
situation where classicism as an artistic approach is rejected for good and all
by artists and masses alike, then revolt remains
as the only alternative: the only
wellspring for creative achievement as opposed to creative masturbation. We have not otherwise all become suddenly
mediocre, but that is the general impression.
Total
revolt sees beyond the crisis, and
beyond the ‘answers’ or resolutions to the crisis. There is no final wall of
certitude against which total revolt is dashed. We all now apprehend the price
of everything and the value of nothing. The total rebel recognises the value of
nothing whatever, and knows that the price for believing there is a value is a
price too high to pay. Tell this to the budding playwright or novelist or poet!
Given appropriate circumstances, it will unblock every creative block there is,
like an effective emetic.
The
creative need is made the more urgent by the fact that the rebellion
instinctively revolts against the self as well. Thus without creativity the
total rebel who is also mentally vulnerable descends into insanity. Short of
that, and with more mental resilience, into a painfully arid life without hope
or redemption, perhaps expressed as a sterile cynicism, or – worse – in drugs,
alcoholism, even criminality. Or in what may be more widespread than any of
these: a pretend ordinariness which finds no satisfaction in pretending to be
ordinary. Is ‘pretending to be ordinary’
the highest I can hope to reach in the one life I have to live?
I
would distinguish this position of the total rebel from the situation of
psychopaths, with whom those in ‘total revolt’ may be confused. The typical
psychopath (if there is such a creature, for I am no psychologist: perhaps I
should say ‘ideal type’ though it seems inapposite regarding psychopathology),
is one with an acute mental condition, a malfunctioning of certain areas of the
brain: the psychopath literally cannot tell right from wrong; he or she cannot
begin to grasp the feelings of others because he or she has no ‘feelings’
herself or at any rate cannot experience certain inner drives self-reflexively.
The physical analogy would be with someone lacking the capacity to feel pain –
as, say, from contact with a hot stove. Needless to say, this puts the subject
in a certain amount of danger: we need our nerve-ends to transmit pain to us
for the sake of our own physical survival. The same is true in the moral or
ethical sense for the psychopath. He can never know the depth of the hurt or
pain he may be causing others because he cannot feel any hurt or pain in
himself. With this lack goes an inability to distinguish right from wrong in
any actions: if we define ‘right’ in its broadest sense as not doing harm to
others and ‘wrong’ in its broadest sense as inflicting harm on others. This is
why criminal psychopaths will most likely be sent to closed mental institutions
rather than prisons. How could the psychopath ever really know how others
thought about him? How could he ever judge the efficacy of an action if he knew
only of certain consequences (such as
the ability to become more powerful) and not others? How could he consolidate a
position of power if he had no actual desire for it except as an amusement,
like a boy with power over flies? The psychopath, to use the current cant, is
simply ‘not in touch with his feelings’. He does
have innate, buried feelings, but although they provide the drive, he cannot
grasp them in their entirety, and so does not really know why he does anything.
I would think his world would be extremely bewildering. I suspect that children
can be cruel and apparently unfeeling for this very reason: their brains have
not developed sufficiently for them to empathise with the pain of others,
including that of harmless small creatures that they may torture to death for
the immediate pleasure and detached fascination of it. But this cruelty also
takes in the suffering children can inflict upon one another. Indeed, it is the
suffering of this cruelty that helps some children to ‘grow up’ that much
sooner – and for better or worse. It is also possible that psychopathology is
present in the hysterical mass mentality of lynch mobs, or is perhaps assisted
by intoxicants, as in the case with some violent hooliganism. This would
represent a temporary suspension of the moral faculties in group form.
The psychopath is not in rebellion because he is not aware that there is
any overall war – certainly none within his own soul. The ‘total rebel’ on the
other hand, whose behaviour is equally instinctive, is fully aware of his
feelings and what he hates about himself, of the implications of actions, of
right and wrong moralities whether he subscribes to them or not. His mental
faculties penetrate beyond all conventional usages and opinions. It is useful
to cite Ibsen again in this context: Ibsen was reported in conversation as once
saying that any idea or belief, taken to its logical extreme, contradicts
itself.
The
total rebel is likely to believe something like the following. All beliefs,
opinions, ideas, theories are – if taken to their logical conclusions – likely
to end up as absurdities. The bigger the
ideas (here he or she departs somewhat from Ibsen, but following the great
dramatist’s line of thought) the grosser the absurdities involved. Plato’s Republic at its most philosophically
sublime is loaded with the creakiest absurdities. Likewise, the imminent Second
Coming and Day of Judgement as quite clearly and unequivocally proclaimed by
Jesus Christ in the New Testament. It is a grand and wonderful, healing vision
– but it did not happen, either then or two thousand years later, and it keeps
getting postponed. Which appears to put Christ on somewhat the same level as
the shabbiest street evangelist waving a placard saying THE END IS NIGH. Marx
is – to my mind – the greatest intellect produced by the 19th
century, even including Darwin; he unravelled the nature of capitalism and the
history of the age of capital more profoundly than anyone before him or since,
and incidentally founded whole sciences along the way. But Marx – might well
say our hypothetical total rebel - thought working-class revolution to be more
or less imminent, and it was the philosophical-dialectical basis of his
theorising that led him to believe this.
Though an admirable predictor in many respects, in this absolutely
central respect Marx was entirely wrong; not just a little wrong but entirely wrong. The whole richness of
subsequent Marxist apologetics, historiography, interpretation and exegesis
rests on this one, big towering mistake and delusion – which looks more like an
absurdity to the total rebel the closer he examines it: as if working classes
could ever rise up to destroy and expropriate, when unemployment and bad
times lead to worker subjugation and impotence, whilst full employment and good
times lead to workers striking only for better wages to climb on the gravy
train along with everybody else. This is not to gainsay a fundamental
proposition that different classes exist, exist mainly in conflict, and that
for various reasons one class may well supersede another in time – not in
itself an exclusively ‘Marxist’ view, as Marx himself was the first to point
out.
Of
course as a Marxist I regard this argument critiquing Marx as requiring
unpicking (for example I would urge closer scrutiny into Marx’s theoretical
justifications for capitalism as an intrinsically self-destructing phenomenon-totality
with all that this implies for social revolutionary fallout as being
inevitable) and I’d want to add that the jury is still out on proletarian
revolution as such; but I do not necessarily help a theory simply by postponing
its culmination in reality to some indefinite time in the future. The same
postponement, as I said, became the fate of Christian eschatology. And if one
says that only conscious revolutionary praxis will bring on the revolution,
this leads to delusive voluntarism if such
praxis does not become embraced by the majority of the working class. I say that is still possible - that is, on a global scale and in relation to the
exigencies and crises of capitalism. It is still possible; but then, anything
is possible. But this is, of course, to take a passive observer’s view rather
than that of the potential or actual participant and fomenter with urgent needs
and perceptions to match.
Where
– between these two - does the total rebel stand? Or does he stand between them
at all?
The
total rebel revolts instinctively against any received body of ideas, from any
direction. He thus appears to negate all metaphysics, though an
anti-metaphysical stand could be construed as being itself a metaphysic, just
as an atheistic stand recognises the Other by negating it: in other words,
atheism is on the same level of belief as theism, for it distinguishes itself
necessarily from the belief that God exists or it cannot be distinguished at
all. It is thus tied up in the knots of perpetual and recurring criticism, like
the querulous son who has let his obsessive hatred for his father dominate his
life – in other words, his father dominates his life. The reasons for the
wholesale negation by total revolt will vary from individual to individual, but
among them lurks precisely an instinctual attachment to something like Ibsen’s
dictum: everything once stated may be reduced to an absurdity by a process of
logical extension. So why swallow it in the first place? This rejection, to be
felt, does not come cheap. Easy enough to reject everything without formerly
having had the experience of believing in everything: without the pain of comprehensive
forsaking, that kind of rejection is trivial and sophomoric, perhaps forming no
more than a prelude to a successful and lucrative career in exegetics. Authentic and painful rejection – that
of the total rebel – must stem from belief constantly and consistently
frustrated, indeed from the deep-rooted desire to believe which is ever
frustrated by the dull drumbeat of continual negation, like a headache.
On
the other hand, the total rebel will know only too well that to passively avoid strong commitment by
obeying the ‘herd instinct’, that is, to follow the footsteps of whoever is
immediately in front of you, and to follow to the bitter end the
anti-philosophical, blinkered perceptions of what is called ‘common sense’, can
lead to a numbing of all the perceptive and critical faculties. Nazism might
not have reached power in Germany if more Germans had put aside the ‘common
sense’ of just getting on with daily life and ignoring the fanaticisms of
politics. This ‘common sense’ disease is affecting the political vitality of
our own society today – with disastrous possibilities in future for all our
civil liberties and environmental standards. Nor is there any point in placing
one’s ‘faith’ in science. Science is not there to be ‘believed’; it has nothing
to show that can or need be ‘believed’, in the sense that one has to ‘believe’
in the Second Coming or in the proletarian revolution. It renders provisional
hypotheses on physical matter. If one says one ‘believes’ in science one might
as well say one ‘believes’ in a cookbook.
But
many can be sceptical without being rebellious. Scepticism may indeed
intellectually characterise one total rebel or another, but total rebellion is
not pre-eminently or necessarily intellectual.
It is instinctive; objection to absurdities is ramified by the energy of
one’s entire being. I refuse to believe ONE MORE RIDICULOUS THING! I refuse to
be played for a sucker! The reaction to proposals is not one of vast academic
critical erudition; it is one of profound nay-saying, the big NO. One simply
rejects everything, and that is that.
The
total rebel may not derive any joy from his rebellion at all; it may provoke
nothing but misery and anxiety, and probably does. In order to do even the
least little thing well, one has to believe in it. But if one rebels against
all beliefs and the sheer fatuity of nearly all activities, how can one do
anything well? If one does anything, with any goal in mind, does this not make
one only a partial rebel? We shall examine this proposition a little further.
Partial
rebels get on rather better. They effect real,
concrete revolutions – in politics, labour legislation, medicine, women’s
rights, gay lib, hygiene, art, literature, national liberation, science,
whatever. That is because one side of them does not rebel against another,
leaving the rebellious side to get on with the struggle without having to face
the danger of internal subversion. But the positive absurdities of the partial
rebels catch up with them sooner or later, when the limitations and
circumscriptions on their partial ‘revolutions’ lead to reversals, or – worse
still – to an even bigger and even more repressive bureaucracy, or to yet more
exegetic pedantry. Or, worse still, to
‘backlashes’ provoked from within all those dark forces that the partial rebel has not included in his or
her enlightened campaign of change and renewal – because the partial rebel
countenances no ‘dark forces’ in himself. There is a paradox. Only total revolt would mop up all this
absurdity residue; but at the same time total
revolt is impossibly futile and even sterile because it implies cross-purposes
right from the start.
The
total rebel is indeed dependent to some extent on the partial rebel, whose
painstaking statistics showing vast discrepancies or deprivations here and
there can be quoted with gusto. The total rebel is a kind of armchair buffoon
in this respect. There is nothing particularly sublime about total revolt
unless the rebel realises this in some kind of artistic achievement (a
political act is more problematical since politics within society as we know it
is generally either compromise or terrorism). But is this achievement itself
not some kind of unsuitable modus vivendi for a total rebel?
Yet
the total rebel may be excused for employing strategies and tactics. For any
strategy, with tactics to match, is to conceal the extent and depth of his
subversiveness from others. One must allow revolt some secrecy. A successful
tactician is one who can keep a strategic secret well hidden. Indeed, without
the secret the total rebel will be socially obliterated. Therefore, the
totality of total revolt lies as much in distracting, circumventing, evading,
even lying as in commitment to total subversion. The more brilliant the
tactics, the more thoroughgoing the rebelling endeavour. What is revolt if not implicitly
violent and extreme vis-à-vis such status quo or ruling order as exists? A
sheepish and mild-mannered revolt is no revolt at all. The implications of
revolt carry the high risk of catastrophe. This revolt must therefore be
concealed from others if total revolt kindles one’s blood and stirs in one’s
bosom. Sometimes it can be cleverly concealed as partial revolt.
I
suggest an outcome in ‘catastrophe’ because the total rebel is – as the title of the 1950s Hollywood film says – a
‘rebel without a cause’. The total revolt does not come from embrace of a
‘higher cause’, however fanatical. It is embedded in the emotional grain of the
rebel, possibly from birth. This is not revolt for something but against
everything. It has infantile qualities: one can see it every day in the
squalling baby who is simply ‘against everything’: no reasoning or placating
can deter it. We carry everything from our pasts within us, and that includes
our babyhood, though some of us pass more or less through babyhood more easily
than others. It does not detract from
Ibsen’s towering genius and profound maturity to claim that he carries his own
infancy with him to the grave. Nor is babyhood and its later residue of
infantilism a pathological condition, as in psychopathology. If to be humanly
mammalian is to be ‘abnormal’ then we are all perversions of nature.
The
total revolt is negative. It is for sweeping away, for destruction. The after
effects are not considered; it is an emotional charge, not a quest for
humanitarianism: the humanitarian vision – as such - is the more positive for
being the more vague, and the more vague for being the more positive. It would
thus be profoundly dangerous if total revolt were not impotent, at least in its
purest manifestation. I am not saying it is good or bad. It is just there. And,
I think, more common than we might believe – if, as I have stated, it runs on
from infancy, which is our common inheritance. I find it more convincing to
conceive of other people, whatever their station, as having an enormously rich
and turbulent inner life than an inner life completely void and vacuous:
something I find difficult to swallow, let alone comprehend. What therefore may
help explain their fundamental passivity lies not in postulating
empty-headedness (except perhaps in such temporary situations as drug-induced
or media-induced stupor) but in postulating the almost exact cancelling-out of
a rebellious impulse by another impulse.
The stasis is a stasis-in-turbulence, not a stasis as a vacuity. Total revolt is not completely absent from the majority; it is simply more completely
manifest in a minority – or so I believe; I have not taken a poll.
Total
revolt flares up in the brush fires here and there of the partial, and here is
where danger lies. The revolt is of its essence negative, and this negativity
may be brought to bear with ferocious intensity upon one single aspect, one
little thing. Every violence may be a partial outlet for an inner total revolt.
Otherwise, in the usually peaceable circumstances, the outward appearance of
calm is actually a seething. This is where creative sublimations are so
desperately important. Without them, there might only be ceaseless outrages of
violence. Sometimes this is recognised in enlightened policies, as when, for
example, convicted juvenile joy riders are given instruction in motor mechanics,
so that their fascination with cars and speed can be channelled into a positive
and useful craft. Total revolt does nothing for one’s self respect, and lack of
self-respect can contribute to crime and to violence. The enlightened penal
policy is to increase self-respect rather than diminish it. By diminishing
self-respect, as per the ‘tough on crime’ policies of lock ‘em up and throw the
key away proponents, one simply recharges the voltage of total revolt, but with
intensifying and ever more dangerous purposelessness. And we should not forget
that one of the purest if also most futile manifestations of total revolt – as
an act – is suicide. Suicide is the ultimate self-defeating and delusive act of
total revolt. It is self-defeating
because it is total revolt expiring as nullity. Not total nullity, since the effect of a suicide will bring distress
and certainly a not-inconsiderable inconvenience to others – but bringing more
sorrow and misery down on a few others can at best be only a pitiable and contemptible
expression of it. Even the armchair buffoon has rebelled better than this – if
only because he had everybody fooled, and not necessarily himself as well.
There
may be some objection to my individualism.
But individualism is inherent in total
revolt. Existence within a rebelling collective requires a high degree of
discipline and a narrowing of the focus of revolt upon specific objects. One
has to water-down the ‘total’ here, for there is no room in the collective
commitment for self-revolt, self-doubt. It is the self-revolt within
individualism which renders total revolt as futile as it is all-encompassing,
together with the impotence of isolation. It is the delusive freedom within the
individual/inner life which germinates or perpetuates total revolt. I did not
say total revolt was a great thing. I merely said it is there. I do not think
this is an idealist construction because I have assumed that the phenomenon
arises from definite reactions within a mammalian, familial and social
development. I do not even say that it is necessarily prolonged and stimulated
after babyhood in all cultures or all possible cultures. I have suggested that
amongst other things it is an extension from infantilism; my own view is that
our particular Western culture stimulates prolonged and profound infantilism in
a variety of ways, some of which are indulgent, others repressive: like the
baby regime. But babies grow up and mental life elaborates seemingly
infinitely. Combine this with our enforced and inauthentic situation of extreme
individualism, and the contradictions inherent in individualised actions, and
one has total revolt.
Too
much has been made of the so-called conflict or contradiction between ‘the
individual and society’. This construction or paradigm is in fact an ideology
reflecting (and perpetuating) a reified social situation. Here is what the
young Marx has to say to counter this formulation, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Milligan translation,
1959, pp. 137-138 ):
My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general
consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it
with hostility. [My emphasis of this phrase – MM] The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore
also my theoretical existence as a
social being.
Above all we
must avoid postulating “Society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the
direct form of a communal life in
association with others – is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and
species life are not different,
however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual
is a more particular, or more general mode of the life of the species,
or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual
life.
This and other
passages of the young Marx might be seized upon by the Right as an obvious
indication of how deeply ‘totalitarian’ Marx really was. Stalin et. al. were
simply bringing Marx’s theory of the socialised individual to fruition on a
vast and terrifying scale. Thus the
downfall of ‘Marxism’ with the collapse in the 1990s of Soviet Communism. But
it surely does not take too much intelligence to see that modern
‘totalitarianism’ is the extreme form of the ‘hostility’ that Marx is actually
describing in the above passage. You cannot even be an ‘individual’ except
as a social being. The social aspect in you gives you your uniqueness
(including refinement of personality), just as your individual needs shape and
identify the social organism within which you exist and survive. To borrow a
term from biology, the reified society is a mutation
of socialised human society, the latter a supreme fact of material human
existence on this earth. Reified ‘Society’ has an all-too-obvious reality as a
mutation (that is, it is a concrete manifestation) but remains a mutation
nevertheless which must be ideologically justified as ‘normal’. If one accepts with Marx, as I do, that
‘Society’ - as set over and above the individual human beings making it up - is
a reification of complex, socialising and interacting human-hood into a single
thing-hood (a process sometimes leading to superstitiously creating a religious
icon for a postulated divine being, or worshipping the Monarch in Their Person
as the supreme embodiment of the State, the Nation, the Church, etc., etc.),
then one will suspect certain implications regarding the total rebel. The total
rebel is a stepchild of the living lie of this living reification: of ‘Society’ as being opposed to himself or
herself as an individual - with a confrontation of a definitely perceived
‘hostility’. The dialectical emergence is that of the total rebel:
individualistic in the extreme, opposed to all society – that is, to all
notions whatever, even to the socialised or internalised being of the self. If
it is not in itself a pathological condition it can – given yet more pressure
from without – become one.
Let
us, then, suppose that total revolt is a greater or lesser pressure upon an
individual psyche. How is it dealt with? Usually – I suspect – by dither,
prevarication, putting-off, hitting-out (often ‘inappropriately’), terror and
morbidity and withdrawal, deception, including occasional self-deception,
sliding from one mistaken misjudgement to another, bad timing, constant vowing
of repentance and renewal, the inexplicable break-up of friendships and even
closer relationships. Of course I must not turn it into a catch-all for
everything, and did not intend this. I merely sought to delineate as fully as
possible all the various and often cackhanded varieties of total revolt in its
outward, day-to-day manifestations. It is too ‘total’ to be realised perfectly.
It is only realised imperfectly, which means often ridiculously. The greatest
fictional exponent of total revolt (if not also the earliest) is Hamlet. My
interpretation of Hamlet the play is
that it is irreducible to a prince’s peevishness about his nasty and corrupt
uncle and his less than innocent mother – reducible, that is, to the
conventional revenge-tragedy genre from which the play descends. I do not see
that Hamlet the prince is rebelling against anything in particular, but against
everything, even against himself and
his visions (for he doubts the provenance of his father’s ghostly visitations),
not to speak of the very idea of consummated romantic love. Naturally a total
rebellion is difficult even to fathom within oneself if one is unaccustomed to
doing so, let alone to resolve. This (I believe) is why Hamlet appears to
dither and prevaricate and hide behind endless disguising ‘tactics’ for so
long. And why he manages to kill – directly or indirectly – all the wrong
people: Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes (a whole innocent family obliterated),
sometimes by mistake, sometimes in exaggerated cruelty, sometimes in futility
(fighting a duel with one who could have been his ally). And, of course, Hamlet
does not resolve his ‘revolt’ very satisfactorily, since although he achieves
partial revolt through several deaths, including that of his uncle, he also
opens the door to conquest and usurpation by Denmark’s ostensible Norwegian foe,
the bitterest enemies of his heroic warrior father’s. (It is difficult to
believe that the patriot Shakespeare intended conquest of any nation by a foreign army to result in a benign outcome.) In
some sense, of course, ‘total revolt’ is achieved since Hamlet brings down his
whole house with him. But it would be difficult to say that this had ‘swept
away everything’ in the clean, unequivocal Ibsenite sense. The actual outcome
is, in the sublimest dramatic sense, entirely messy and self-defeating. And that
is because the effort is individualistic - Hamlet makes no attempt to form a
faction or an alliance, let alone a connection with the people - and is riven
with self-revolt, self-contradiction and implicit terror of the most
fundamental kind: a common affliction, I suspect, with total rebels. Had Hamlet forged a secret political alliance
to expedite his political take-over, as any sensible prince would do in these
circumstances, he would have been only a partial rebel, and no doubt the
Elsinore bureaucracy would have burgeoned and carried out a more subtle
repression with the resulting prosperity and all the new ‘reforms’ and
mushrooming of non-governmental and regulatory agencies. But Hamlet’s stance in
the world is one of total revolt partially comprehended. (It is of course
fatuous to extrapolate too tenuously
from plays, but it has struck me that Hamlet could never have got on
particularly well with his own father in life – no doubt why he exiled himself
for so long as a student in distant Wittenberg.) Hamlet, in other words, is our
best-yet fictional exemplar of the total rebel.
What
is the practical way to proceed? Total rebellion does not admit of
practicalities because it is a revolt against reality: a mutated reality within
a reality. It is not by the same token an escape
from reality. Escape from reality is
something we all do all the time (or as much of the time as we can) whether we
are ‘rebels’ or not. The total rebel does not ‘escape’ from reality all the time, however. He faces reality
both below and beyond the visionary. That is his problem. But because he is
against reality in its perceived totality,
the effect or outcome in his particular and inadequate case seems much the same
as an escape, except that it is awkward and fumbling because the rebel impulse
is – though ingrained – not developed or steeled in experience. I would like us
to be able to distinguish within ourselves the difference between escaping and
rebelling. The difference is fundamental, even if – paradoxically – the outcome
has all the appearances of being much the same whether as ‘escape’ or as
‘revolt’. One of the total rebel’s
tactics must be to perceive and work on the fact that society itself will
attempt to blur this vital distinction by way of misleading the total rebel somewhere
along the way. (Psychiatrists and
counsellors take note.) Of course, some would interpret ‘escape’ itself as a
tacit or implicit rebellion, though words begin to lose any meaning once they
are subjected to such sophistry.
I do
not mind if people use ‘total revolt’ as an excuse. They prevaricate, yes, and
they are humbugs to the extent that they do, but they are also on their guard
because they have conjured up the ineradicable image of revolt, and – once
conjured up - ‘revolt’ is a powerful stimulus, not always controllable or
predictable. It can also turn round the more immediate despair, manifested in
common depression, whilst preserving and safeguarding the existential despair. Escape equals sustained depression: this
is my E equals mc squared. Escape or mere ducking out is a lowering,
dehumanising, demeaning, roasted peanuts substitute for a three-course dinner.
You would think from what I have just written that total revolt with its
incoherent fumblings was even more so. I say it is a healthy growth, drawn from
the healthy lusts of babyhood honestly acknowledged. Once you fix ‘revolt’ in
your mind instead of ‘escape’, then who knows what outcome there will be? An uncertain outcome is at least better than
a certain dead end. It is in the order
of personal advancement, but – as it turns out – of survival, not specific
pecuniary rewards or status or whatever, all of which are despised as
contemptible. As we find ourselves being picked off, one by one, we have to
assert what we can of our rebellious and self-righteous natures even if such
righteousness looks like humbug and self-serving nonsense. By way of analogy,
if my prayer to God (in whom I do not believe) delivers me from falling off the
mountain at that moment because it strengthens my tenuous grip, what do I care,
if I survive? Total revolt is the nonsense that might yet save us from the even
more complete and totalising nonsense that is steadily reducing each of us to
human nullity and degradation – that is, nullity and self-degradation apparent
even to our own eyes, if we let it be manifested.
Total
revolt is especially useful as and when conditions outside the self become more
extreme. So far, we have existed in some kind of uneasy equilibrium with the
great powers. We have survived in the margins – says he of the working middle
class. But the very margins are contracting. Revolt must be brought home and
must come from within. It can fasten on all sorts of justifications – who cares
what particular justifications are when survival is the order of the discourse
at hand? Provided the justifications are
all embracing, radical and ‘unfair’?
So might speak the total rebel. But
total rebellion is objectively futile and is a product of despair even as it
keeps immediate despair at bay. Some might say it has its most insidious
manifestation in terrorism, which is also despairing, secretive and
conspiratorial. Yet terrorism remains –
for all its violence and bloodshed – a partial revolt, because paradoxically it
embraces the same ‘common sense’ view of the world of appearances as that of
its ostensible enemy, the social Establishment. If anything, the terrorist view
is even cruder, for it honestly believes that the blowing up of supermarkets,
buses and the like (which can only
kill and maim the innocent) makes a literal difference – that is, against a
capitalism whose true power is anything but
‘literal’. Capitalism is profoundly theoretical – the first and to date the
most sophisticated abstract means of social control ever invented, (which,
incidentally, makes it the ideal benefactor of the triple A’s: alienated academic
apologetics). Capitalism in even its grossest manifestations (and especially
those) can survive the blowing up of individual supermarkets. In fact it can
thrive on that, just as the incompetent and uncertainly mandated George W Bush
and cohorts thrived politically on the massacre of 11 September 2001. The instruments of total social repression
are already in place – from space satellite downwards – and those controlling
them are only waiting and itching for the chance of practical and wide-scale
implementation. Terrorism turns out to be the collective equivalent to
individual suicide in terms of futility and self-defeat – it always would have
been, with or without satellites. The total rebel has to reject terrorism on
the grounds that its limited perspective brings about the exact opposite of
what it self-delusively intends. Total revolt is, of course, also
self-defeating in the attempt at any action (I think I have made this abundantly
clear, that is, it is self-defeating by definition), but because of its totality it can retreat and manoeuvre
and self-justify till kingdom come - or, produce artistic masterpieces of one
kind or another to stimulate the masochistic tendencies of the better-off but
insecure Establishment cognoscenti.
Total revolt’s best friend is that which corrupts it: a social-aesthetic
acceptance – even enthusiastic acceptance – from within the ranks of those it
hates.
There may be a way ‘forward’ for the
total rebel which incorporates even self-doubt and self-revolt without the
latter becoming entirely crippling. This will lie in cultivating two apparently
mutually contradictory tendencies/strategies within one life and personality.
The first tendency/strategy is the unstinted cultivation of inner revolt:
nothing to be compromised, nothing to be admired, nothing to be embraced,
nothing to be flattered, everything to be (deep-down) despised, in a charged
attitude ranging from contempt to loathing. The second is the strategic
disguise of respectable excellence.
Revolt
is an admirable principle of education and self-improvement. If the student
rebels against the teacher or subject (or both), then the onus falls heavily on
that student to be better than the teacher and to excel in the subject, to
overcome it by first mastering it. Half measures will not do if the revolt is
profound and all encompassing. Only through mastery
can the rebel strike home: otherwise, if he fails or evades the points he is
ostensibly fighting, then he is dismissed as an irrelevance. No one, however,
can dismiss the rebel who knows more than the conformist and ‘performs’ better.
The revolt comes closer to being ‘totalised’ by being that much more effective
on both key fronts of inner rebellion and outward excellence. Only total rebels
totalising through strategies make the best and certainly most interesting and
challenging students; the rest are comparative laptop-fodder.
The situation in the
arts world is different. Here, the rebel-artist is expected to ‘rebel’ to the extent that ‘rebellion’ in the arts
becomes a kind of conformity. Even rebellion against the commodity system in
art (Duchamp), ends in the creation of pricey commodities (extending even to reproductions of Duchamp’s ‘found’ and
signed urinals). In view of this double bind it is interesting to note the
profusion of means artists have found for temporarily evading the otherwise
endless round of rebellion-into-commodity which has always characterised modern
art. Unfortunately, in order to be able to afford to make into a work of art
something that could never be a
commodity (the equivalent to a sand-painting, or for example the shrouding of
large buildings or great boulders in silken fabrics) the artist must either be
independently wealthy or have a public or private patron. In fact it appears
that many of the more avant-garde artists of today have gone entirely the other
way in deliberately producing pricey commodities endowed with a frisson of
nihilism. Even in graffiti art a wall
can become purchasable.
In fact, the ‘respectable
excellence’ strategy can become beguiling of itself, if it is too successful.
The total rebel ceases to cultivate the rebellious half, ceases to be schizoid,
in effect. When this happens the wellspring of inspiration for excellence dries
up; and the edge is taken off the energy. The total rebel’s face to the world
has to be total rebellion, which
includes both destructive motivation and as high a quality as possible in
deflective strategies.
This
is hardly the ideal life of poise and repose. It is not a recommended formula
for ‘inner peace’. It imposes a severe
strain on the total rebel’s every waking hour, and only those with strong
constitutions and stomachs can really survive it while still keeping to it. In
any case, as already stated, it always fails in the end. Arthur Miller once
said that ‘failure is ill-defined’, but I think it is possible here to
designate degrees of failure in the total rebel. The highest degree – i.e.,
that of the most ‘positive’ - is some kind of outstanding achievement wrung
from the depths of rebellious loathing and despair. (This is what Brustein
means when he tells us that his great dramatists reconcile themselves to the
world ultimately and only through their own creations.) The second highest is
the bringing about of some sort of political chaos, at least the partial
bringing-down of something outside
the self and immediate environs. The third highest degree of failure is to have
managed to live through a relatively unscathed life steering between the Scylla
of inner accommodation with the hate and the Charybdis of complete social
ostracism and/or obliteration. One level
down from this in the falling away from total revolt is criminality, including,
of course, violence and murder. Terrorism features in here somewhere. And then on down the scale (in terms of
rebellious ineffectuality if not also ethics and morality), to mindless
incapacitation through drug and alcohol abuse, down to a semi-willed
self-destruction or down to suicide. We get to a stage along this hypothetical
declining route where the ‘total revolt’ has become a parody of itself. In practice, these stages cannot always be
easily distinguished or stratified like the neat levels of Dante’s Inferno. The
great artist whose art derives from total revolt may also be going downhill as
an alcoholic whilst creating his best work out of the very deepest rebellion.
In the case of the rebel Jean Genet, the artist reached his art via
criminality.
All this talk of ‘failure’ is
deliberate. Fundamentally, the total rebel is on a hiding to nothing. This is
because he is a supreme embodiment of the dysfunctionality of reified society.
Society malfunctions and mutates to the extent that a separation between
‘Society’ as a reified object and ‘the
individual’ (another reification) is manifested in concrete and
institutionalised ways. It produces its most extreme representative in the most
extreme of all individualists, the total rebel. Of course, if one adheres to
dialectics one will be most certain that the total rebel is a transitional figure: for just as he
points in one direction to the radical individualism of dysfunctional society,
so – in the other direction – does he point towards the supersession of that
society, since although he embraces his nurturing by internalising the old
society’s most extreme features, he also hates it and kicks against the pricks
(or bites the nipple that suckles him). If dysfunctional society’s most perfect
exemplar is the one who hates it the most and the most comprehensively, then
this is not only the measure of its dysfunctionality but also of its
dangerously centrifugal tendencies and of an intimation of its mortality.
Mutated society is itself self-destructive.
