I was first introduced to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck as an undergraduate. I read it for my Theatre History class and again in my Dramatic Literature class. For the second class, I had the opportunity to perform a severely truncated version of the script, looking at the text through psychoanalysis. This performance emphasized the use of the phallus. Also, during my undergraduate studies I was asked by a friend to be in his Mask Club production of Woyzeck to replace an actor who quit. His production, his own translation, emphasized the terror and anxiety of mental illness. As I was reading this play again for this course, I was struck by the anxious state of the text. Since the play is a cobbling together of remnants found among Büchner’s notes and papers it has a decidedly non-linear structure. The scenes are fragments pieced together in whatever way the translator deems fit. This non-linear structure hearkens to both previous incarnations of the production in which I was involved. The two types of anxiety represented in those productions, castration anxiety and mental illness (most likely schizophrenia), become one in the chaotic non-linear structure of the play.
Linear narratives are the mediated form of the phallus. The structured form, indicated by a clear beginning middle and end, or more accurately exposition-inciting incident-rising action-climax-resolution, that moves in one direction, are indicative of patriarchy, the hegemonic system of oppression of women. So the traditional structure of the narrative is an extension of the patriarchy in its rules and organization and in its very form, as a phallus. The structure of Büchner’s piece is far from linear. Even when translators foolishly attempt to force it into a linear structure by “ordering” the scenes, it is full of gaps, spaces, and jumps. This irregular structure could be viewed as representing our titular Woyzeck’s own madness. In another way it represents a subversion of the patriarchy and, thereby, a castration of the male form.
With regards to the patriarchy, the play has no numbered scenes (though the translation I read had numbers) and many scenes seem to start in the middle somewhere. Even in the order that I read, the scenes did not seem to follow a narrative. If anything, they were episodic, like theatrical Expressionism, being a collection of scenes as incidents in a characters life, but lacking the cause and effect relationship of “one thing led to another” necessary for linear structure. The canon of theatrical literature, particularly from the 1830’s, does not include narratives of this type. It is subverting the system, creating a mania that cannot be resolved, only accepted. This system is often associated with the patriarchy. Helene Cixous called for an “écriture femenine” in response to the maculinized theatrical form, which includes the linear structure. This approach appropriates non-linear forms under the umbrella of feminized writing and in that way, Woyzeck is structurally a feminine piece. It tears down the patriarchal demand for linear structure and replaces it with this hysterical
form. This subverting of the Hegemonic system is a source of anxiety for those in power. The entire purpose of creating a codified system is to maintain power. This de-masculinization of the linear structure attacks that power and strikes fear into the hearts of men.
Freud speaks of much of the anxiety (if not all) as being related to the fear of castration. Men fear the loss of the phallus and approach the threat of castration by either destroying the threat, oppressing it, or subsuming it. A woman represents the threat of castration since the phallus is replaced by what Mulvey in her 1975 work Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema calls “the bloody wound”. In the case of Woyzeck, the phallic form of linear structure is castrated and we are left with the bloody wound of its chaotic episodic structure. This absence reminds the man of the castrated phallus and fills him with anxiety. The play makes him afraid, less-so for the content (albeit terrifying) but for the form which becomes a sign marking absence, absence of the phallus.
Ultimately Woyzeck is a truly terrifying work. It taps into that anxiety of loss of the phallus and also the loss of the power structure in the patriarchy by way of its hysterical and emasculated form. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this. Perhaps modern horror would be more successful with our desensitized audiences by castrating the form instead of upping the gore or skin (which Mulvey would argue perpetuates the male gaze, what with the fetishism and all). The gore of the castrated form might however be too much to be profitable and would alienate male clientele. Needless to say, there is much to be learned about the nature of horror from a mass of shuffled papers discovered in a desk drawer in the early 1800s.
No comments:
Post a Comment