Paraguassu de Fátima Rocha
The short career of the British playwright Sarah Kane didn’t stop her texts from figuring among those written by the great names of the post-dramatic theatre. Author of five plays[1], all of them dense and involving themes under the aegis of denunciation or alert subtexts, which move the critics and revolve the existential issues camouflaged by the traditional theatre dogmatism nevertheless without completely abandoning the basic elements of this type of representation, included in her text as intertextual relation.
4:48 Psychosis, written in 2000, is the poetic translation of the scientific text that determines the syndrome demonstrations which names the play. In his article “The loss of reality in neurosis and in psychosis”, of 1924, Freud described the psychosis as a disturbance between the ego and the world, while Vernon D. Patch, member of the American Psychiatric Association, argues about the sense of reality distortion, the inadequacy and the lack of harmony between the thought and the affection. To the psychosis is associated the depression of which the condition of anguish, fear, sadness, loneliness, despair and low self-esteem (206-7) is presented in Kane’s text in a poetic way.
I am sad
I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve
I am bored and dissatisfied with everything
I am a complete failure as a person
I am guilty, I am being punished
I would like do kill myself
I used to be able to cry but now I am beyond tears
I have lost interest in other people
I can´t make decisions
I can´t eat
I can´t sleep
I can´t think
I cannot overcome my loneliness, my fear, my disgust
I am fat
I cannot write
I cannot love
My brother is dying, my lover is dying, I am killing them both
I am charging towards my death
I am terrified of medication
I cannot make love
I cannot fuck
I cannot be alone
I cannot be with others
My hips are too big
I dislike my genitals
(Kane 2001:206-7)
The psychotic patient’s drama is portrayed in all its nuances in 4:48 Psychosis, presented as a speech from the one who experienced the disease and is conscious of its effects over the mind and the body. Therefore it becomes a testimony of the pain that naturally arouses alert feelings in the reader / member of the audience for being part of his daily life. Hans-Thies Lehmann, as he describes different aspects of the post-dramatic theatre in Postdramatic Theatre (2006), notices that
The mimesis of pain initially means that torture, agony, physical suffering and pain are imitated and deceptively suggested, so that painful empathy with the played pain arises in the spectators. Postdramatic theatre, however, is above all familiar with ´mimesis to pain` (´Mimesis an den Schmerz`- Adorno): when the stage is becoming like life, when people really fall or really get hit on stage, the spectators start to fear for the players. The novelty resides in the fact that there is a transition from represented pain to experienced in representation. (Lehmann 2006:l66)
Sarah Kane innovates in terms of form as she creates a text without character or reference specification as regards the stage space, creating what Karenji Jürs-Munby conventionalized
… ´open` or ´writerly` texts for performance, in the sense that they require the spectators to become active co-writers of the (performance) text. The spectators are no longer just filling in the predictable gaps in a dramatic narrative but are asked to become active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are also willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning. (Lehmann 2006:6)
This opening prospect also permits directors and actors to create various performances and since it was staged for the first time in June 2000 in London
The original production counted on three actors on stage, being two of them women and one man. In 2002, the French director Claude Règy stars 4:48 Psychosis in Paris
It is something quite delicate. Sarah Kane put dashes, indicating above all that we’re dealing with a dialog, and I wanted to maintain it under the shape of a dialog. Apparently we’re dealing with a doctor, from reminiscences and conversations she had with the psychiatrist that looked after her. It is known she developed for one of her doctors a boundless passion. This scene in dialogs takes place in her conscience, in her memory or imagination. In that case I think it would be a very serious flaw to put a real doctor beside her, filling in a psychiatric questionnaire. (Neto 2002:1)
Luiz Päetow, actor of Nelson de Sá’s production in an interview to Folha Online, declares not to be a patient character with a doctor character, but the projection from one onto the other, valuing the prospect of duplicity that will be analyzed further on.
Sarah Kane’s experimental theatre also works on the extremes of the formal composition, or even according to the character’s expression in her first metatheatrical reference “How can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone? / Not a life I could countenance”. (p. 213) If on one hand it’s a dramatic text, on the other hand it resorts to distinguishing stylistic resources, in which different kinds of poems such as the dramatic poem[2], the narrative poem[3] and the concrete poem[4] mingle with, forming a whole cohesive characterizing the inner reality allegory. And in this context, the authoress seems to search in Fernando Pessoa, Baudelaire, e. e. Cummings and William Carlos Williams the revolutionary molds of her dramatic text. In a hybrid composition, she takes up again the resources of the modern novel mainly used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as concerns the inner monologue use, which are included the stream of conscientiousness, soliloquies, flashbacks and flashforwards.
Besides the aspects emphasized above, 4:48 Psychosis is a narrative concerned with the memory dramaturgy and makes use of several mechanisms that reveal the mind’s functioning, based on the theoretical considerations of Henry Bergson, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, among others.
Bergson relates memory and conscience, arguing that all the stocked experiences are often affected by the mind’s activities and defends the past, present and future coexistence as constant renewal and recreation agents. Beckett, on the one hand, analyzing the work In Search of the Lost Time of Marcel Proust, characterizes two kinds of mental activities performed by the memory. The first one concerns the voluntary memory responsible for the selection of the stocked events and their possible revelation, that according to him “… is the intelligence’s uniform memory; it is reliable for the reproduction, before our inspection satisfied with those impressions of the past formed by the intelligence conscious action” (Beckett 2003:32), while the other one is set in motion through external events.
4:48 Psychosis, according to what was mentioned before, will deal wit the course of a character who was taken ill with depression that even though being under treatment will have suicide as an end. In the course of the play she presents the plans she drew up to commit suicide, demonstrating to know the methods and the reactions they provoke. In a voluntary memory evocation, she presents the report made by her doctor when questioned by him:
Have you made any plans?
Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself
All those things together?
It couldn´t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.
(Silence)
It wouldn´t work.
Of course it would.
It wouldn´t work. You,d start to feel sleepy from the overdose and wouldn´t have energy to cut your wrists.
(Silence)
I´d be standing on a chair with a noose around my neck.
… (Kane 2001:210-11)
The character’s voluntary memory is also evoked at the moments she presents the plans she had drawn to commit suicide, among which are included taking an overdose, cutting her wrists and hanging herself, whose acts are discouraged by her doctor, for they wouldn’t work because of the effects that would make her feel drowsy and weak, impeding he to carry out the suicide (210-11) at this moment, it is convenient to remember that Sarah Kane’s narratives are most of them a result of researches and bring up truths many times unknown that lead to reflection. Kay Redfield Jamison, in his text: When the night falls: understanding the suicide, emphasizes that:
These singular methods of suicide are far from being only a shoddy spectacle of grotesque death; they give evidence of the despair and determination of the suicide’s mind. Its own extravagance, somehow, makes the act more real. They certainly evoke horror, but also give us a flash of the unimaginable unhappiness and madness. (Jamison 2002:106)
The character’s suicide plans present, however, contrasting points as for her final decision and they manifest themselves in her unconscious through the fear and the uncertainty regarding the act and may be noticed at several moments of Kane’s text, according to the observations that follow.
The character turns to her voluntary memory more than once as she elates the abuses suffered during her treatment, describing the lack of sensitivity of the medical staff, the disregard with which she was treated by most of them, the humiliation and the shame for being sick and the resentment for not being loved by the only doctor who had voluntarily touched her (210). Still as expressions of the voluntary memory she one by one makes a list of the medicines used in the attempt of helping her to recover, as well as their side effects and the influences they exerted on her behavior (223). Kane’s play is invariably complete as for the narration of the daily events of those who suffer from the depression illness. She restrict herself to details as when narrating the advices she had probably received during the development of the disease, as if she recited a handbook, point to what should be done in order to assist the recovery. In this handbook she finds out she needs to achieve goals and ambitions, to overcome the drawbacks and the weakness, to avoid the pain and the shame, to be loved and to be free, among others (233), that in Kane’s text they are characterized not as sentences said a random, but also a reminiscences of her voluntary memory.
As for the involuntary memory, it’s set in motion by external elements that relate themselves to retained events and it’s set in motion by spontaneous memories. In a first stage the character remembers a test carried out to check the concentration and the memory level, the test known as “Serial Seven” is used on patients under he suspicion of mental diseases. It consists in counting off backwards from 100 to 1, at intervals of 7 or 3 numbers. At this moment the character isn’t successful, for her counting is made in an out off course way. She relates this counting to the time she had stayed at the place of the test and afterwards recalls that
But drinking bitter black coffee I catch that medicinal smell in a cloud ancient tobacco and something touches me in that still sobbing place and a wound from two years ago opens like a cadaver and a long buried shame roars its foul decaying grief. (Kane 2001:208-9)
The character’s involuntary memory has its mechanism almost always set in motion through the senses. In the passage above it was the taste associated to the smell that trigged off her memories concerning the treatment. When she reports the search for herself, once again it’s the encrusted smell that makes her take up again the anguish pain of loving the unknown. “Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on… without expressing this terrible awful physical aching… that I have for you.” (214)
In Kane’s text it is also possible to find the tendencies of the expressionist movement that left its mark in the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th, and which was characterized for portraying the character’s inner life, making use of non-realistic techniques, highlighting the reality fragmentation, the stream of conscientiousness, that presents itself in a continuous form and in which a succession of disconnected images mirror the character’s unbalanced mind that when joined portray all of her suffering, granting the text a total plasticity. This new configuration of Kane’s text fulfils the dramatic writing current tendencies of “reclaiming no matter which text for a fortuitous staging” as “every text is able to be dramatized since the moment they use it on the stage” (Pavis 1999:405). In this context, the authoress adapts the stream of conscientiousness technique, leading the character to express in a stream of words the images that are projected in her mind and relate themselves with the painful reality in which she lives, and the destruction of the linearity among others.
As the narrative is not linear, the chronological and psychological time get confused. The real or chronological time is marked by the questions brought up by the character and by the description of her emotional and physical state, which one has a non-exact notion of duration for not being defined the beginning of her deliriums, but a notion of when they’ll finish: “At 4:48 / when the desperation visits / I shall hang myself…” (207), while the psychological time is revealed through the memory plan. Here the character recovers her recent past punctuated by the memories of the treatment which she’s being submitted to, her disappointment with the doctors and the effects of the medicines she needed to take.
That way 4:48 Psychosis goes on constructing itself as a patchwork quilt, in which the real time is intersected by the character’s memories fragments, one moment manifesting itself as a succession of disconnected images translated to the verbal language, the next as rescues of past events that are broken out instantly.
The character’s suicide plans present, however, contrasting points as for her final decision and they manifest themselves in her unconscious through the fear and the uncertainty regarding the act and may be noticed at several moments of Kane’s text, according to the observations that follow.
The play’s opening presents the insecurity lived by the character as for the consummation of the suicide act and repeats itself at several moments of the text. She initiates the performance with an inner monologue marked by long silences, which are broken by a voice that questions about her friends and the exchange the character establishes with them: “… What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (206). In other words, in this fragment occurred in real time, she questions herself about her relations with the external world and the way how they develop, demonstrating in the subtext her intention of asking for help. The silent is a constant in Kane’s play and it is interpreted by Pinter (1972:121) and Sarrazac (2000:147), respectively, as a language hidden under the words that as it is established it causes a complete exposure of the being; and as a noisy happening that derives more from an excess than from an absence of words.
(A very long silence.)
- But you have friends.
(A long silence.)
You have a lot of friends.
What do offer your friends to make them so supportive?
(A long silence.)
What do offer your friends to make them so supportive?
(A long silence.)
What do you offer?
(Silence.)
(Kane 2001:205)
This reflection is, in fact, a result of a conversation between her and her doctor that will be presented in the play further on, as a part of her memories.
One of the features of the person that develops the depression is being involved by an immense rate of people willing to help him and to pull him out of the state of neglect in which he finds himself. However, the psychotic patient is not capable of establishing exchanges, whether affective or social ones. He gets used to receiving, but he is not able to give. The questions brought up by the character sound like an attempt of avoiding the suicide she plans, almost as a help request. Yet, she seems not to believe being worthy of any help for not corresponding to the attention she receives.
The character’s uncertainty condition will repeat itself in an ironic way further on when she doesn’t want to die, to soon afterwards affirm she doesn’t want to live any longer and that she decided to die in that year (207), and she makes an alliance to the demonstration of fear of doing herself any harm, affirming that “It is fear that keeps me away from the train tracks” (211).
In this prospect of searching for answers, Kane establishes a direct relation with Ibsen’s characters, whose construction process points to the self-narrative. According to Tereza Menezes,
... the characters know what moved them to the execution of their actions and make the narration of themselves, reconsidering their past under the present look and retell their stories to each other, searching their identities in process. (Menezes 2006:129)
The self-narration in 4:48 Psychosis leads the character to her double, in other words, she becomes subject and object of her actions, feelings, wishes, joys and sufferings, or even according to Pavis (2005:117) she projects herself looking for a dialog. It is a “self” inflated by the salvation notion that clashes with the “self” weakened by the disease. What the character searches out of herself is actually in her inside, as Saint Agostinho’s speech teaches in his Confessions: “… late I have loved you, oh Beauty so ancient and so new, late I have loved you! Behold you lived in me, and outside I sought you” (Agostinho 1996:285). The blockages established by the disease impede the character to find her double, though she unconsciously knows of its existence, and in a mixture of rage and tenderness for loving someone she is not able to reach (herself) she faces the inner discomfort.
Still in the post-dramatic theatre context in which the text linearity is broken, the dramaturgy besides making use of constant flashbacks, it also uses the flashforwards technique, provoking a reflection about the several moments of the character’s life. In these flashforwards the character conjectures about the death of her double and how she will have overcome the anguish, leading the present, past and future threads to merge building up an only web rocked by the despair and the loneliness.
I dread the loss of her I´ve never touched
love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears
I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak
I miss a woman who has never born
I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet
…
my thought walks away with a killing smile
leaving discordant anxiety
which roars in my soul
No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope No hope
…
In ten years time she´ll still be dead. When I´m living with it, dealing with it, when a few days pass when I don´t even think of it, she´ll still be dead. (Kane 2001:218)
The metatheatricality also present in Kane’s play is associated to the character’s life and the metaphorically to her disease. In her speech she translates the actor’s feeling who claims for the recognition and feels responsible for his own performance, valuing much more his inner existence – 4:48 Psychosis reflects among other things the character’s search, due to her disease, for attention, solidarity and love; it criticizes the styles that work with the imitation considering them as a theft and also the textual construction. And at this point it becomes evident in Sarah Kane’s writing the role of the herald as he not only reveals the painful processes of the depression victims, but also the precariousness of the human relations. The character declares that writes for the dead people that are still to come, because after 4:48 she will no longer talk (213). The relation with the cruelty theatre principles of Antonin Artaud (1993) may also be noticed here, once that the dramatist’s text exposes the reality in a harsh way as proclaims the philosopher, and thus acting it induces to reflection, causing the restlessness and the perturbation.
4:48 Psychosis, as mentioned before, portrays the life of a character involved with the depression drama, and besides the aspects already presented in this analysis, it also recovers behavioral aspects of the victim of this illness. Sarah Kane translates to a dramatic language the character’s mental expressions, including the repetitions of words and sentences, negative thoughts and guilt sensation, that one moment project themselves in a poetic way, the next through a grotesque language. Common acts to the individuals bearers of the depression syndrome are also described by Kane. The self-mutilation, for instance, is related to previous situations of physical and emotional discomforts and it is a way of controlling the pain itself. As she was called into question by the doctor about the cut on her arm the character affirms that it had made her feel very well. And once again linking one event to the other through the memory plan she begins to talk about her double (p 218).
Kane’s play is invariably complete as for the narration of the daily events of those who suffer from the depression illness. She restricts herself to details as when narrating the advices she had probably received during the development of the disease, as if she recited a handbook, pointing to what should be done in order to assist the recovery.
to achieve goals and ambitions
to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard
to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent
to overcome opposition
to have control and influence over others
to defend myself
to defend my psychological space
to vindicate the ego
to receive attention
to be seen and heard
to excite, amaze, fascinate, shock, intrigue, amuse, entertain or entire others
to be free from social restrictions
to resist coercion and constriction
to be independent and act according to desire
to defy convention
to avoid pain
to avoid shame
to obliterate past humiliation by resumed action
to maintain self-respect
to repress fear
to overcome weakness
to belong
to be accepted
to draw close and enjoyably reciprocate with another
to converse in a friendly manner, to tell stories, exchange sentiments, ideas, secrets
to communicate, to converse
to laugh and make jokes
to win affection of desired Other
to adhere and remain loyal to Other
to enjoy sensuous experiences with cathected Other
to feel, help, protect, comfort, console, support, nurse or heal
to be fed, helped, protected, comforted, consoled, supported, nursed or healed
to form mutually enjoyable, enduring, cooperating and reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal
to be forgiven
to be loved
to be free
(Kane 2001:233-35)
The death’s approach is eminent in 4:48 Psychosis, not only for the character’s clear expression as she affirms she wants to die, but for the near-death experience repetition, characterized by the conscience projection out of the physical body without being totally disconnected, providing the rehabilitation to life. The character seems to experience this sensation at several moments of the play. According to her perceptions this experience processes itself in the following way:
Hatch opens
Stark light
A table two chairs and no windows
Here am I
and there is my body
dancing on glass
In accident time where there are no accidents
You have no choice
the choice comes after (Kane 2001:230)
However, Sarah Kane’s play isn’t merely a question of the death drama, but it also broaches interpersonal relationships that are established between a patient and a doctor, the conflicts arising from these relationships and the difficulty of coping with the feelings.
Her memories reveal a passion she had developed for one of the doctors during the treatment, who according to her had been the only one who had understood her and made her feel closer to the cure. Yet, the same love transforms itself in resentment since the moment that, according to the reality she believes in, she notices she was mistaken about him:
… I trusted you, I loved you, and it´s not losing you that hurts me, but your bare-faced fucking falsehoods that masquerade as medical notes…. And while I was believing that you maybe felt the distress that sometimes flickered across your face and threatened to erupt, you were covering your arse too. […] To my mind that´s a betrayal.… This is not the a world in which I wish to live. (Kane 2001:210)
At this moment of the play her mind imbalance becomes more evident, in so far as the doctor’s sensitivity and the ability of understanding the patient’s suffering have ld her to mix the feelings, which is not an isolated fact for being part of most of the long duration clinical treatments. However, one must consider the character’s eternal search for herself, the search for connections between her inner world and the one that surrounded her. The sensitivity that abounded in him was lacking in her, and once again the “self” and the double faced each other.
The character’s lines start fitting in each other and the previous speech, result of her voluntary memory, is intimately linked to that one expressed at the moment that the language is a result of the immediate thought, at the very instant she experiences an epiphanic moment realizing the non-belonging reality, making it evident the maladjustment of the relations between the being and the world, the dichotomy between body and mind and the fusion space/time. The first one takes place during the play course, while the described below occurs in the beginning. Here the character says: “I had a night in which everything was revealed to me.
The character’s reality, penetrated by the delirium, will be carried out at the end of the play when she expresses her thoughts, moved by the distress of the last moment. There, she is victim and executioner of herself and the member of the audience a witness of the despair, when at the final moments the character utters a stream of conscientiousness soliloquy.
a solo symphony
at 4.48
the happy hour
when clarity visits
warm darkness
which soaks my eyes
I know no sin
this is the sickness of becoming great
this vital need for which I would die
I´m dying for one who doesn´t care
I´m dying for one who doesn´t know
you´re breaking me
Speak
Speak
Speak
ten yard ring of failure
look away from me
My final stand
No one speaks
Validate me
Witness me
See me
Love me
my final submission
my final defeat
the chicken´s still dancing
the chicken won´t stop
look after your mum now
look after your mun
Black snow falls
in death you hold me
never free
I have no desire for death
no suicide ever had
watch me vanish
watch me
vanish
watch me
watch me
watch
It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind
please open the curtains
(Kane 2001, 242-45)
4:48 Psychosis is a diary of a life. Someone’s life in search of the identity, victim of the social disregard, of the lack of affectionate intimacy and of solidarity and of the anxiety resulting from the preciosity excess. In this clash between the being and the world the disappearance of the character becomes more evident, nevertheless without leaving a voice that echoes and acclaims everyone to look around.
REFERENCES:
Agostinho, Santo. Confissões. São Paulo, Nova Cultural. (Col. Os pensadores). 1996.
Artaud, Antonin. O teatro e seu duplo. Trad. Teixeira Coelho. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1993.
Beckett, Samuel. Proust. Trad. Arthur Nestrovski. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2003.
Bergson, Henri. Matéria e memória: ensaio sobre a relação do corpo com o espírito. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999.
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Jamison, Kay Redfield. Quando a noite cai: entendendo o suicídio. Trad. de Gilson B. Soares. Rio de Janeiro: Gryphus, 2002.
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Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York
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Pinter, Harold. Writing for the theatre. In: GOETSCH, P. English Dramatic Theories: 20th Century. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972.
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NOTES
1 Blasted (1995), Pheadra’s Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998) e 4:48 Psychosis (2000). (KANE, 2001)
2[...] only one character, working as alter ego of the poet taken to a long monologue, plays a dramatic roll. […] the protagonists care less about answering the speaker than about expressing their own ideas and feelings. Cf. Moisés, 2004, p. 355
3The rhythm follows a modulation more attentive to the melodic-semantic- emotional units than to the syntax and many times the phrasic segments join together with relative symmetry, that reminds one of the verse symmetry. Ditto, p. 356. I asphyxiated the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs, I fucked little children while they begged for mercy, the extermination fields are mine, everyone left the party because of me, I’ll suck these shit eyes and send them in a box to your mother [...] (p. 17)
4The Concretism extolled the spacialization and the geometrization of the poem and an ideogrammatical syntax. Ditto, p. 306
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