Forgetting Lot's Wife

On Destructive Spectatorship

Martin Harries

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823227341, 9780823227334
• eBook ISBN: 9780823227358
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: History of Art

Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? Forgetting Lot's Wife provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century. Its subject is the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history all lead back to the story of Lot's wife: looking back at the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, she turns into a pillar of salt. This biblical story of punishment and transformation, a nexus of sexuality, sight, and cities, becomes the template for the modern fear that looking back at disaster might petrify the spectator. Although rarely articulated directly,
this idea remains powerful in our culture. This book traces some of its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical consequences. Harries traces the figure of Lot's wife across media. In extended engagements with examples from twentieth-century theater, film, and painting, he focuses on the theatrical theory of Antonin Artaud, a series of American films, and paintings by Anselm Kiefer. These examples all return to the story of Lot's wife as a way to think about modern predicaments of the spectator. On the one hand, the sometimes veiled figure of Lot's wife allows these artists to picture the desire to destroy the spectator; on the other, she stands as a sign of the potential danger to the spectator. These works, that is, enact critiques of the very desire that inspires them.
The book closes with an extended meditation on September 11, criticizing the notion that we should have been destroyed by witnessing the events of that day.

1
Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe

About suffering they were always wrong, the Old Masters.

—Alan Bennett, A Question of Attribution

FIGURES OF SPECTATORSHIP

The spectators imprisoned in Plato’s cave and Lucretius’s witness of shipwreck are perhaps the most canonical figures for spectatorship in aesthetics and philosophy.¹ While these figures, and especially the spectral watchers in Plato’s cave, continue their vigorous afterlives, the changed conditions of modern spectatorship also have demanded new critical models. Film’s challenge to familiar regimes of spectatorship and the increasing centrality of spectacular mass political forms make the 1930s a period of particular pressure in the history of spectatorship. That spectacle might radically change people was at once a conviction, and a fear. Antonin Artaud embodies these antinomies with force and fascination. As a form to express these antinomies, he found Lot’s wife.

The partly occulted figure of Lot’s wife and the Genesis story’s concern with looking as destructive participation haunt Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double, a collection of essays he wrote during the 1930s. The goal of that collection is to establish a theater that would radically disrupt the spectator, compelling the spectator to occupy a place beyond psychology, on the one hand, and beyond politics, on the other. Precisely this sweeping goal locates the historical place of Artaud’s project. That is to say, rather than being an “outsider” artist whose production bears an only accidental relationship to the main trends of his time, Artaud’s theatrical formulations have distinct filiations to problems many identified as central in the 1930s. Many longed for a theater that would attain the condition of ritual and wanted to reclaim theater’s central role in society as a privileged site of the sacred. Theater artists were at once threatened and flattered by massive state ceremonies that also aspired to a grasp on the sacred. The state claimed ritualized, sacralized theatrical powers. The central exhibits in this theater at once political and theological are the massive spectacles of totalitarian states, which in many cases were explicitly based on ritual models. Theater artists saw the state seizing a theatrical power, and longed for an efficacy to equal that of the state. These political spectacles seemed to possess the power to produce subjects, and some artists desired this power. Central to this political theater is the abolition and transformation of the observer; at least in principle, or in the fantasies of ideology, the spectator becomes participant.²

Walter Benjamin’s analysis of this ideology of spectatorship as it played itself out in the mass rallies of the Nazis is especially germane here for its emphasis on the ritual elements in these spectacles. Fascism, writes Benjamin,

sees its salvation in granting expression tothe masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to its knees, has its counterpart in the violation of the apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values.³

One response to violation of the theatrical apparatus in the enforced expression of ritual values was Bertolt Brecht’s. Theater could refuse that mode of expression and abandon the ritual interpellation of the subject. The phantasm of theatrical participation, seen from a Brechtian standpoint, always remains potentially a kind of ritual, and it is precisely such ersatz and politically deleterious magic that theater must reject. Like Brecht, Artaud rejected the false magic of theater; unlike Brecht, Artaud hoped to counter this false magic with true magic, not the disenchanted stage. Artaud’s failures—his failure to raise money for various attempts to realize the Theater of Cruelty, his failure ever to stage a production that approached his ideal—were in many senses inevitable. Artaud’s “failures,” then, are similar to the “failure” of Eliot’s The Waste Land, which, Franco Moretti has provocatively claimed, is a consequence of its desire to achieve what only mass culture could achieve—the creation of modern myth.⁴ Artaud’s failure has similar causes: Artaud desired a thorough, ritual demolition of the subject. Such demolition work was, perhaps, possible, but only in the mass cultural or political arena Artaud scorned.

Lot’s wife is one of Artaud’s ambivalent figures for this demolition. Lot’s wife is not explicitly central to The Theater and Its Double. Indeed, Artaud engages in a kind of obsessive forgetting of Lot’s wife as if conscientiously to undermine Christ’s commandment: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:33). In the essay that forms the third part of The Theater and Its Double, “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène,” Artaud elaborates on Lot and His Daughters (plate 3), a painting in the Louvre long attributed to Lucas van Leyden.⁵ Artaud argues that the painting renders the centuries of painting after it “inane and useless,” and that the theater should learn from this canvas.⁶ Those who have written about the painting after Artaud have often repeated the quirks of his reading. Especially remarkable is Artaud’s neglect of the men of Sodom and their desires, and of the figure of Lot’s wife. I focus here on Lot’s wife because she is a nexus for Artaud’s concerns about spectatorship.⁷Lot and His Daughters is a large canvas that collapses into a single frame a sequence of moments in the story of Lot. At the upper right, brimstone falls spectacularly on Sodom: a church tower collapses, ships sink, a crowd gathers in a square.⁸ In the distance, one sees open water and Gomorrah’s destruction. Below the bay, a path crosses a large pier or bridge heading to the left of the painting: Lot and his daughters, one carrying a pack on her head, walk to the right, followed by a mule. Lot’s wife stands at the end of the pier, facing the collapsing cities, illuminated by the light of the disaster. In the lower left, before a bright red tent, Lot sits with one of his daughters in his lap, one hand on her knee, one around her neck; a tree rises behind them, and forms a powerful visual division between the right and left sides of the painting. Lot’s other daughter pours out wine. The skeleton of a large animal, maybe that of the mule that earlier walked across the bridge, lies in the foreground. In the upper right, a craggy hill rises. The path from the pier winds through this landscape. At the top of the hill sits a structure that includes what may be the end of the path: a bridge that resembles an aqueduct.

One goal of the contradictory project of the Theater of Cruelty is to achieve a theater that will radically, and perhaps fatally, disrupt the spectator and the codes—especially the linguistic codes—upon which the viewer depends. Artaud’s reading of Lot and His Daughters is of a piece with this project.⁹ He concentrates on the foreground of the painting, in which Lot’s daughters get Lot drunk and seduce him; he remembers the details of the incest quite clearly. Artaud comically leaves out the earlier part of the biblical story of Lot from his account: “an unprecedented naval disaster seems to have occurred,” he writes. “It would be difficult to say,” Artaud continues in this deadpan mode, “why the impression of disaster, which is created by the sight of only one or two ships in pieces, is so complete” (35). In the opening paragraph of “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène,” he clearly knows that the painting is based on the Bible story: “Of course the Bible in the Middle Ages was not understood in the same way we understand it today, and this canvas is a curious example of the mystic deductions that can be derived from it” (33). The whole chapter returns to this system of “mystic deductions” that was, according to Artaud, interpretation of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Yet Artaud proceeds by his own process of mystic deduction—or mystified subtraction—as if the viewer has no way to interpret the cataclysm in the background of the painting. Perhaps Artaud’s reading of the painting provides a model for the rejection of the text he champions for his new theater. Artaud asks why, in Occidental theater, “everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained in the dialogue … is left in the background?” (37). At the margin of the painting Artaud lavishly celebrates is Lot’s wife, an image of the destruction of the subject in thrall to spectacle that the Theater of Cruelty should perform. With a certain amnesia—whether symptomatic or strategic, or an amalgam of symptom and strategy—Artaud actively forgets much of the biblical text that provides the viewer one way to decode the shipwreck and destruction of cities on the right. Artaud represses what everyone remembers and remembers what most forget: he chooses to remember the incest—if this remembering is a choice—and represses the fate of Lot’s wife.

To imply that Artaud has repressed the figure of Lot’s wife may intimate that The Theater and Its Double is the symptomatic registration of some complex of Artaud’s. This may well have been the case. More important to my argument here, however, is how Artaud’s leaving Lot’s wife out of his discussion of the painting illuminates his notion of spectatorship. Theater, in his best-known analogy, is like the plague:

The theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure. And the plague is a superior disease because it is a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification. Similarly the theater is a disease because it is the supreme equilibrium which cannot be achieved without destruction. It invites the mind to share a delirium which exalts its energies; and we can see, to conclude, that from the human point of view, the action of theater, like that of the plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses; and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it. (31–32)

No passage better illustrates what Susan Sontag calls Artaud’s “ultimate, manic Hegelianism”:¹⁰ for Artaud, theater becomes a force for Aufhebung, so powerful that some participants expire in its dialectical violence. Theater achieves “supreme equilibrium,” but death is as likely a result as cure on the way to this equilibrium.¹¹ The destruction of the cities on the Plain, then, prefigures Artaud’s desired attack on corruption. This passage about the theater as plague also underlines affinities between Artaud’s project and the aims of political mass spectacle. Revealing “to collectivities of men their dark power” in order to foster “a superior and heroic attitude” is analogous to what Benjamin calls, in a debunking mode, “the production of ritual values” and the giving of expression to the masses.

Lot and His Daughters achieves the bodily impact Artaud wished for theater:

It seems as if the painter possessed certain secrets of linear harmony, certain means of making that harmony affect the brain directly, like a physical agent. In any case this impression of intelligence prevailing in external nature and especially in the manner of its representation is apparent in several other details of the canvas, witness for example the bridge as high as an eight-story house standing out against the sea, across which people are filing, one after another, like Ideas in Plato’s cave. (35–36)

Artaud comes no closer to mentioning Lot’s wife, one of the figures on the bridge, in his analysis of the painting. He occludes Lot’s wife, a figure for the dangers of looking, only immediately to read those figures on the bridge as part of a Platonic model of spectatorship. The figures on the bridge are like those puppets masquerading as “Ideas” that the prisoners in the cave take to be real. One can wonder, however, whether Artaud means to include Lot’s wife, separated as she is from the other figures on the bridge, among those who bear a likeness to the spectators in Plato’s cave. At least in one way, Plato’s spectators are the antithesis of Lot’s wife: they cannot look back. Plato writes that they have been “prisoners since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads.”¹² One may compare Lot’s wife with the one separated from the crowd, Plato’s figure for the philosopher who sees the real: “Suppose one of them were let loose and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire” (318). Plato’s scheme is the puppet show of cruelty: the philosopher must be “compelled to stand up” and is “forcibly dragged” from the cave (318). Artaud and Plato alike depict a certain sadism in the loss of illusion. But one might also venture that Lot’s wife embodies an “Idea” of the wrong kind of looking. It is not clear whether Lot’s wife figures the spectator of the theater Artaud imagines, or the reverse, the anathematized double of that spectator, the spectator who looks at the wrong thing, who participates in the wrong way.

IS THE IDEAL SPECTATOR DEAD?

The punishment of Lot’s wife figures the impossible achievement of one aim of Artaud’s theatrical project: the spectacle of destruction destroys the one who looks. But this metamorphosis and its strange violence are not the fulfillment of Artaud’s project; if destruction were all he desired, Artaud would be a much duller figure than he is. Destruction should also be transformation. Lot’s wife, then, embodies the ambivalence that marks Artaud’s ideal spectator. Lot’s wife disappears in “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène”—along with other fragments of Sodom—only to surface as the figure of a cultural crisis in the opening of The Theater and Its Double, its preface “The Theater and Culture,” which was probably written after all the other essays that make up the volume. This appearance of Lot’s wife illuminates Artaud’s ambivalence about the place of destruction and transformation in his desired theater.

The crisis Artaud identifies is one of signification—Artaud laments a confusion with its roots in “a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation” (7)—and, more specifically, a crisis of looking. Lot’s wife becomes the image of this general crisis. It is as if the repression of Lot’s wife causes the dispersal of symptoms across the body of The Theater and Its Double. Artaud’s central argument in this preface is that the crisis of the moment of The Theater and Its Double, first published as a collection in 1938, results from the fact that culture, rather than being “coincident with life,” has instead been designed “to tyrannize over life” (7): “If our life lacks brimstone [soufre], i.e., a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force” (8, OC 4:13). Here the ambivalence that motivates Artaud’s representation of the world Lot flees becomes especially apparent. The word Artaud uses here, “soufre,” is the term the French Bible uses to describe what falls on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Artaud, Spectatorship, And Catastrophe
• 2 Hollywood Sodom
• 3 Anselm Kiefer’s Lot’S Wife: Perspective And The Place Of The Spectator
• Coda Lot’S Wife On September 11, 2001; Or, Against Figuration
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index