I know what I want to write (Jackpot January #28)

Been reading more Artaud on the Theatre of Cruelty, and it’s clarified my thinking.

You see, for a long time I’ve been basically against strict realism. Or not just realism, but specifically the literary ultra-realism that just consists of presenting trivial and small aspects of life in acute psychological detail. Such work fetishises representation. Art doesn’t matter for its transformative qualities, but rather how well it seems to chime with real life. In this mode, all art is thus reduced to mimicry.

Satires on the rich are often created in this mould. Triangle of Sadness and Succession are two famous examples, and I like them both okay. But they’re too obsessed with cleverness, too full of the stink of human talent. They ride or die on their dialogue.

So much art has been made about petty feuds, family struggles, money worries, broken marriages. None of these are bad subjects on their own, but they are so limited and too well-trodden.

Artaud wants to do away with language as the primary vehicle for expression in theatre. He asks why it can’t all be more tribal, more ritualistic, and less straightforward. Theatre is the place for wars, plagues, toxic desire, delirious love, grand murders, incest, cannibalism, gods punishing the human race. I love him for that. I love that he wants nothing but the most extreme and intense.

Now, my true passion is for stories more than scripts. I live in the written word and I love it. I believe writing has the power to do what Artaud intends… but from a different perspective. Since Artaud aims to decentre the human altogether, he concludes that language is often an obstacle because it is all about human communication.

What he sees as a limit I see as an opportunity. Every single thing I write follows the same trajectory: a person or group of people tries to go on with their life, either in their own way or following the crowd, and always find themself foiled by the startling, incomprehensible mysteries of the world. The human starts big and gets smaller and smaller until they almost vanish.

I like that language in prose tends to psychologise. I like it because it means I can start in the place we naturally live our lives: in our own heads. I can always use the individual’s desires and thought patterns to draw a reader in, and then spin round and round with them until all that thinking stuff unravels. Art is a feeling we carry with us everywhere, and it always sits right at the tip of our tongues.

So that’s me. And I like it more than the pure Artaudian piece because it is a journey in itself.