[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Stars collide, human and fleshy limbs, temples, pillars, distillation flasks, scorpions, a frog and a scarab descend “with exasperating, nauseating slowness.” “Heaven has gone mad,” the young man cries as he pushes the girl aside.A medieval harnessed knight enters, accompanied by a sighing wet nurse whose heavy breasts have to be supported with both her hands.While she points at the lovers and screams that their daughter is guilty of incest, he cavalierly denies the fact that she is their daughter and asks for food and her breasts.They exit, after which the young man finds himself on a market, looking for his girl.A priest tries to worm out of him to which part of her body he feels most attracted.He answers: “To God” and a few seconds later night suddenly falls and the earth starts shaking during another cataclysm.Everybody runs haphazardly across the stage, till a huge hand grips the madam of the brothel by the hair.As her naked body is swelling up, she bites God’s wrist, from which a spurt of blood springs forth.When it is light again, everyone is dead except for the madam and the young man, “who are looking at each other hungrily.” The wet nurse—now breastless—appears, dropping the dead girl onto the floor.The knight throws himself on the nurse, asking for his gruyere.The nurse lifts her dress; the young man wants to run away but stays fixed like a petrified marionette.“Don’t hurt Mama,” he says.Scorpions crawl from under her dress, copulating in her swelling and splitting vagina, which “becomes vitreous, and flashes like the sun.” The young man and the madam flee, whereupon the girl stands up, sighing: “The virgin! So that’s what he was looking for.”In this highly symbolical scenario, Artaud depicts the process of becoming.The Spurt of Blood is his account of the transgression from complete, unified synchronization to loss as a result of the implementation of the law.Two young people love each other in an all-absorbing harmony and undifferentiated unity where they find themselves not restrained by societal regulations or an artificial straitjacket.To escape the arbitrary meaning of their words, they have recourse to voice inflections and sound manipulation.The roaring sound, by which they are interrupted, however, marks a caesura and leads them into the world of differences and multiplicity.“From the opening sequence, the world of the eroticism [is] pitted against ‘civilized’ culture” (Donahue 1994, 227).Instead of being integrated into a fluid body, limbs are torn apart and fall, along with the other objects, “as if in a void.” The gap that separates them irreversibly from the Wholeness or Absoluteness has been introduced to their lives.All of a sudden they are being labeled as sister and brother on a linguistically differentiated stage.Only at that point can the wet nurse call out: “Incest,” issuing the universally acknowledged interdict in societies.Their expulsion from the Garden of Eden introduces them to society, where everyone is appointed to his particular place and position.Besides the priest and the madam, a judge, a shoemaker, a sexton, and a greengrocer make their appearance on the market, representing various occupations in the symbolic field.From then on, the female sex presents itself as both a site of attraction and a horrendous realm of self-destruction.The will to bridge the magnetizing gap and cancel the lack is outweighed by the devouring impulses that seem to emanate from the female organ.The scorpions pulsating in the nurse’s vagina vigorously symbolize this medusian ambiguity.8The Spurt of Blood is Artaud’s interpretation of the Genesis myth.The “well-made world” in which the girl and the young man are living—a world ruled by platonic love—is exchanged for the degeneration of a sexually corrupted world.From the moment of their expulsion from Paradise they have lost their state of virginity and bliss.This loss of innocence, as Artaud does not grow tired of teaching us, is issued by the onset of sexuality.Significantly, the whore bites God’s wrist, a clear reference to Eve’s bite of the apple.Whereas the boy and girl are almost indistinguishable from each other in their asexual love declamations, after the cataclysm sex is the ruler of the world with the whore sighing as if reaching an orgasm in the boy’s arms.It is in this light that we have to interpret the girl’s closing line: “The virgin! So that’s what he was looking for.” In Artaud’s ideal world before sexual love and the loss of unity, virginity is presented as a state of cosmic perfection.In an interesting footnote, Albert Bermel notices that the young man’s earlier outcry “I have lost her, give her back” leaves more ambiguity in the French original “Je l’ai perdue, rendez-la-moi” (Artaud 1956, 78).Uttered right after he had been separated from his girl, the complaint that it is she that he has lost is the most logical interpretation, yet the undetermined object might as well refer to a feminine noun like “l’innocencé” or “la virginité” (Bermel 1996, 263).The choice of beasts falling from the sky and emerging from the wet nurse’s vagina adds to the wish to return to a state of prehuman living.Frogs, beetles, and scorpions, after all, belong to the oldest creatures on earth.Beetles and scorpions, age-old and crawling along the surface of the earth, wearing their carapace, their skeleton, at the outside, could be said to walk around in their bones.Frogs are amphibians, which are hard to categorize as they are living both on land and in water.They are a species that stands at the very beginnings of life, from which all other creatures have sprouted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]